Barrelhouse Magazine, Volume 25, Spring 2025
Leafing Through Jack Gilbert’s The Dance Most of All for Inspiration
1. Write a poem about the place you are and who you’re with. Preferably when you’re in a place you like to be, a place where you find great beauty.
The Quarterly, Volume 9, April 2024
Last Love/Death as Metaphor
And those
In great pain will liken it to death and may
Die soon, but make no mistake: in the midst
Of life you are in life, pained or not.
Swamp Ape Review, Volume 5, Spring 2022
Swimmers
He doesn’t want to go. Funerals are ritual and he can handle that ritual when the dead’s not his own. Now that it is, he wants to fall apart, not show some tasteful glimpse of mourning.
Jabberwock Review, Volume 42, Issue 1, Summer/Fall 2021
Skittles
Skittles was a rescue dog. That’s what the owner told me the first time we met. Though met, I suppose, isn’t the right word. We didn’t introduce ourselves, shake hands, exchange names. We were simply heading the same direction, walking to the elementary school playground on a Saturday morning.
Puerto Del Sol, Volume 54, Issue 1, Spring 2020
If, On an Afternoon, Then
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
It was only when she started to change the sheets every Thursday evening that he began to wonder if it was possible that she was having an affair.
Potomac Review, Volume 64, Spring 2019
Precious Things
Her collection begins with a vibrating pleasure ring, and Susan keeps it secret. She takes out a P.O. Box the next town over, where the risk of running into someone she knows is low.
The Northern Virginia Review, Volume 32, 2018
John Coleman
All day and night, he ran, stopping for short spans to rest, but he never stayed in one place long. In the distance, he heard hounds barking and pushed himself, fleeing through the day’s heat and the cooler light of the moon.
Clackamas Literary Review, Volume XX, 2016
Creeper
Creeper is back again. He’s in the studio behind her. Alex can feel his presence even before he opens his mouth to speak. His presence is singular, unique, different from the men in the carpenters union that rent space in the building.
Barrelhouse, Issue 15, 2016
Somewhere in London
This is one of those stories where you think you know the plot. One of those stories where the characters are dead and don’t know it. Only there’s no grand revelation here, no tacked-on cinematic twist to add melodrama.
Whiskey Island, Issue 67, 2016
The Waiting Room
You’re dying and you know it. You don’t need tests to confirm it, but you’ve made this appointment, and now you’re sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a book you can’t keep your focus on.
Portland Review, Volume 62, Issue 1, Winter 2016
River Full of Lost Sharks
The question keeps coming to mind, popping up at odd moments. It’s unnerving, unsettling, yet you have to ask: “Is someone in the house?”
Phoebe, Volume 44, Issue 1, Fall 2014
The Men’s Room
She didn’t find his comments humorous. And why did it make a difference? Was it better to stand? If anything, standing seemed worse.
The Southeast Review, Volume 32, Issue 2, 2014
A Nervous Tic Motion
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
It isn’t long after an earthquake strikes your city, shortly before your thirty-second birthday, that you begin acting skittish at the slightest vibration or noise. Your heart flutters with fear. Your legs strain. And you have to employ every ounce of will to resist rushing for an exit, plunging through fire doors, stumbling down steps.
Beecher’s Magazine, Issue 4, 2014
Maria
For that man, she gave up the only thing she ever wanted as much as the stage—for that man, the one who isn’t here. The room is filled with his scent—two dozen, long-stemmed roses—but Ari never arrives.
The Normal School, Volume 6, Issue 2, Fall 2013
A Day at the Races
It’s as if drivers don’t understand what happens when metal hits metal going at high speeds. They don’t quite fathom that metal impacting on flesh will demolish flesh, abrade the tissue, shatter that life and others.
Water~Stone Review – Vol. 16, 2013
A Prelude to Damnation (Novel Excerpt)
When the young soldier died—one John Elliott of New Hampshire, who claimed to be sixteen but couldn’t have been more than fourteen if he tacked on the time he’d spent in his mother’s womb—Aloysius Whitten decided he’d had enough, and come what may, he’d try to escape.
Harpur Palate – Vol. 12, No. 2, Winter/Spring 2013
Requiem
The youngest girl is only four years old when her brother suggests they hold a séance for their father. He’d gone into the hospital three weeks before with flu-like symptoms and never come out. The mother doesn’t explain this too clearly.
The Pinch – Issue 32, Number 1, Spring 2012
Man with the Sliding Pins
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
At the outset, it sort of tingles, then goes all ghostly, even though it’s still there. Started with segments of digit: top half of a big toe, two-thirds of a ring finger. The opposite of phantom pain. It proceeds with intensive anxiety, a fundamental surge of inevitable loss, separation, an unhinged joint.
Avery Anthology – Issue 7, 2011
This is Hardcore
Perhaps he slipped in a bit too quietly. Maybe she wasn’t paying attention. Either way, she didn’t hear him come into the attic, and since she had the volume turned down, he almost called out before he spotted a couple writhing around on the TV. Instead, he hid behind the door.
LIT Magazine – Issue 19, Winter 2011
No Man’s Band: The Life and Death of Reclusive American Musician James T. Selway (Excerpts from the Documentary Interviews)
I’m not a religious man myself. I haven’t read the bible, don’t put much stock in Revelation, but if there’s an apocalypse, his music will provide the accompaniment. That’s what it sounds like to me, at least. All moaning and grunts, yelps and weird out-of-tune instruments.
The MacGuffin – Volume XXVII, Number 2, Winter 2011
Dust Jackets
He started collecting children’s books after the first conversation he and his girlfriend had about raising kids. At the time, they weren’t engaged and they shared an apartment they didn’t own, but they were in love and the prospect of educating one or two hypothetical offspring was so exciting he couldn’t wait.
Licking River Review, Issue 42, 2011
First of the Gang to Die
“Golden Boy,” his father kept calling him in the eulogy. He must have said it six times at the bare minimum. “Golden Boy.”
Pearl – Issue 44, 2011
Ping Pong
Sometimes I picture us sitting at our desks as pieces on a chess board. Pawns up front, sycophants, raising hands, eager to answer each question. I’m on the side a few rows in, a knight holding onto an outdated chivalric code, looking at Lena, three seats behind/two rows over, making occasional eye contact and wishing she was mine.
Potomac Review – Issue 47, 2010
The Bridge
Sometime before I was born, an anonymous artist had spray-painted the question “whiCh OnE yall hit My Boy on His hade?” on the train bridge between Cheltenham and Abington townships, like a hometown banner. Later in life, simply mentioning this catchphrase was like a secret password to anyone who had grown up in the area during that era.
Gargoyle Magazine – Issue 55, 2009
Gunslinger
My grandfather, in the end, was a small hunched man, balding with gray strands sticking out the side of his scalp, but he frightened me nevertheless with his direct questions: “So you got a girlfriend yet?” Truth is, I don’t remember him much at all.
Rosebud Magazine – Issue 45, Summer/Fall 2009
Death & Cinema
A few men had talked about it—a heavy metal musician even claimed he’d do it at a concert that past Halloween—but only one person had the guts to stage his own death, and that was Alejandro’s hero, Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Pear Noir! – Issue 2, Summer 2009
Second Mediation on the Sun
Cause & Effect – Issue 10, August 2008
Chicken Dance
Philadelphia Stories – September 2008
Physics
This poem originally appeared in the Summer 2008 issue and was reprinted in The Best of Philadelphia Stories, Volume 2.