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A Drive Home Across the Embers of the Chesapeake Bay

A Drive Home Across the Embers of the Chesapeake Bay The city is gray, as always.  Ahead a sea of potholes,   infrastructural craters like the  surface of the moon, pooling up the  silvery late-winter light, rainwater.  Sunday, eleven in the morning. Early, impatient.  Some alt-rock track beats melodramatically  against the plastic car radio,  against the dirty windows, rolled up  against the revolting scent of the bay.  Prosthetic oaks stretch thick branches towards the  blank slate sky, powerful, precisely  decapitated to make room for powerlines.  There are business signs here, missing letters  and unenthused. Thai Restaurant, one announces  in a monotone. Moma’s Grocery says another, one faded green  M away from the comfort of motherhood.  The car, only dented, bright red metal  and a leaky tire, rattles past the grocery store  where I bought birthday cakes and Valentine’s Day flowers...
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One Last Sunset

 One Last Sunset Only three months post collapse, a lifetime gone in a season. So, I made it to midwinter. Saw the fatal snowfall stretch across the fields. None of McCarthys blood gangs came to be-  the only blood is spattered on the chiffon anthrax, coughed dregs of an esophagus. The anatomical sputter seeps crimson into orange, all the longerlight colors of a late afternoon  sunset in December. There aren't any sunsets anymore. Only the rot of a conscious corpse, only the clotty grey of poison sky. I look west and know that these dead colors are nothing but my own corneas bleeding to snowmelt. Hell, if they aren't just as beautiful. Published By: Loyola University Maryland 2023
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Palm Reader

Palm Reader The frigid waiting room is, for us alone, filled with warmth. You curl at my side, my tender hearth, eyelids hung low and drifting into half-sleep. Your sea-mist eyes are haloed, a valley of purple-black exhaustion. The fingers that I hold limply in my own are weathered, matured past us by decades, mottled in week old scrapes, latticed in untimely wrinkles. I wrap this feverish hand in each of mine, bonding our fate lines with a light squeeze. A gentle, nescient promise to keep us young, for now.   Published By: Loyola University Maryland 2023
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Orbit

Published By: Towson University 2022 Orbit   “Doesn’t it bother you?”       The question passed my lips before it had even formed in my mind. The silhouette next to me shifted, abandoning the comfortable position she had found lying in the grass of our small hill.       “I mean—” Jess shrugged. “Not really.”       Her face was hard to read in the sparse moonlight, but I could still make out the concern superimposed on her features. It was a familiar expression—it appeared whenever I talked about something like this. I propped myself up with my elbows, grinding dirt into the crevices of my exposed skin. My neck remained craned toward the sky. I didn’t take my eyes off it. I heard the slightest sigh slip from Jess’s lips, the same sigh I always heard whenever I was being difficult.       “It bothers you though, doesn’t it?” she asked, politely hiding her exasperation. I forced a swallow down my throat, wh...
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