FEATURED POEM: “Survivor”
Many of us are survivors of one thing or another. As such, we bear the responsibility (and sometimes the burden) of remembering on behalf of those we survived.
“Survivor” (featured below) was a finalist in the Naugatuck River Review’s 2025 Narrative Poetry Contest and appears in their most recent issue. It’s my fifth publication in the journal, and I’m delighted for my work to be there again.
SURVIVOR
I’m on the #3 express train to Chambers Street,
and the local-station platforms whizz by, as have the years.
You’d have been amused––people on the train wear Beats
headphones and man-buns. Some are eating rice crisps,
others Doritos. Everyone’s jabbing their phone, ignoring
the ads for personal injury lawyers above them.
I bought a wooden cricket box in a market in Shanghai.
Old men held them to their ears to hear their crickets sing.
Men drinking martinis in ‘30s suits are incised
on its panels. I think it would have made a good gift
for you, with or without the crickets.
I’m reading your obit again––how you’re survived
by your wife, your son, your daughter. No mention
of the nineteen-year-old boy just turning seventy
to whom you gave a copy of The Little Prince,
highlighting––If you love a flower that lives on a star,
it is sweet to look at the sky at night.
I’m sitting on the back porch of a house in the Poconos,
having a cocktail. It’s night, I can smell the wisteria,
crickets are singing, and I’m looking up at the stars.
READ SOME OTHER POEMS (Click on the hot-linked grey text)
“The Prize,” Indianapolis Review, Spring 2025
“Boy Jumping Off a Cliff,” “Audrey Hepburn and the Southern Belle Soirée,” and “Highway at Night,” South Florida Poetry Journal, Issue #33, May 2024 (scroll down; poems are alphabetical by author’s last name)
“A Friend Writes from Paris” and “Inventory,” The Inquisitive Eater (New School Food), 2024
“Red Geraniums,” The Rainbow Project (Poets Wear Prada)
“Act III” and “Lo Stadio dei Marmi, Rome," Inlandia Journal
“Sonnet with Birch Trees, Tatars, and Crayolas” Cider Press Review, Vol.25 Issue #1
“Vocabulary Lesson,” Verse Daily
“Somewhere in Georgia” and “Belated Valentine for Alex,” Under a Warm Green Linden
“The Death of Heidegger,” Penn Review
“Christ of the Frogs, with Thieves,” “Catchment,” and “Operating Instructions” Full Bleed, (Maryland Institute College of Art)
“On the Sayville Ferry,” The Westchester Review
“Boy, Stepping from the Shower, a Towel around His Waist,” Full Bleed, (Maryland Institute College of Art)
“December 31st,” The Inquisitive Eater (New School Food)
“At the Precise Moment of the Solstice” and “First Encounter,” Marathon Literary Review (Arcadia University, Philadelphia)
“Monet vs. The International Pop Art Exhibit,” Honorable Mention, E. E. Cummings Prize, New England Poetry Club.
“Cytokinesophobia,” Palette Poetry
“At the Shrine of Moinuddin Chisti,” Podium, an online publication of the Unterberg Poetry Center at New York’s 92nd StreetY
“Beneath Me,” all the sins
“Questions for Anthropophogists” - The Inquisitive Eater (New School Food)
“Predilections of the Carnivores” - The Inquisitive Eater (New School Food)
“Self-Driving Tesla Involved in Fatal Crash” - New Verse News
“Correction” - New Verse News