Let solitude be my nightingale
in shining feathers calling all night
to wake the crows sleeping in
their windswept nests.
}
May the crows wake rested,
like the calm after the third
eye of the gale has passed,
like the second blowhole
}
of the whale once the tidal
wave has crested and blessed
the seabirds with momentary
saltwater nests.
}
May I wake alone like an
unbroken wishbone in
an abandoned home for
forgotten wayward
}
turkey bones, and may I
have one wish, another
afterlife of flesh and
feathered wings
}
even if it severs me,
even if it drains my
marrow and leaves me
hollow like
}
the moon when it
is new and ruined.
—Honorable Mention, the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize 2017; first published in the
San Diego Poetry Annual 2017-18 (Garden Oak Press, February 2018) and appears
here with permissions from the publisher and the poet
lives in Seattle, and his first full-length collection of poems, What Other Choice, was selected by Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken as winner of the 2010 Exquisite Disarray First Book Poetry Contest. His poems are anthologized in I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (Lost Horse Press, 2010), Poems Against War: Bending Toward Justice (Wasteland Press, 2010), Pontoon: An Anthology of Washington State Poets, Number Ten (Floating Bridge Press, 2007), and The Simple Vows Anthology (Imprimatur Press, 2006).
His work also appears in Arroyo Literary Review, Cairn, Cimarron Review, Crab Creek Review, Crowd, EOAGH, Floating Bridge Review, Gertrude, New Mexico Poetry Review, Nexus, OCHO, Poet Lore, Quarter After Eight, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, Rio Grande Review, Scythe, Sentence, Simple Vows, The Dos Passos Review, The Los Angeles Review, and White Crane Journal.