Award Winning Poetry

Winner of the 2011 American Poet Prize

1-800-THE-LOST

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The weight of the receiver in my hand:
the down bird in my palm first lifting you.
The counselor’s words: rehearsed, a burlesque bland...

Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020
Best of the Net Nominee 2021

Smiling at the Executioner

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

As if the open barrel were a lotus;
its roots anchored in mud.
How undeterred...

Winner of the Folio Editor's Prize

Ode for an Ode on a Grecian Urn

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Ode, let your sorrows go.
Let brides be ravished, trees forsake their leaves,
let lovers kiss and fade, daughters age.

Winner of the Annie Finch Prize

On Recognizing Saints

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As if to find new icons for her life
or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine
she scans our purchases too consciously...

Winner of the New South Writing Contest

Amber Alert

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A white Ford, black gate, Georgia plate,
squeezes into our lane. In the back, a Whitetail –
tagged and slashed from her chest to hind legs...

Robert Frost Award

Sugaring

Sestina for an ill boy

A loyal maple lingers by your bed: nature fiercely altered.
Its sugar finds your pulse, then trickles in with a rhythm
partly boy, partly tree.  For comity we call it Mr. Pipes...

Featured in Verse Daily

Against Elegies

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What if we let you sing first?
What if we look for you with Mallarme’s
blank stare: birds round an empty dish...

Winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize

The Rape of Chryssipus

She came home bone by bone. First her shin bone, then her skull. In the end, 26 of Molly's bones came home to us."
― Mother of 16-year old Molly Bish, whose remains were found 3 years after she was abducted and murdered in June 2000.

For the rape of Chryssipus, King Laius suffered.
The gods saw what he took -- a young boy's chance
to play in the Nemean Games, to make his offerings...

Winner of the 46er Prize for Poetry

Bingo Night for Missing and Exploited Children

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Before we went underground. Before you fell through a gyre with no sound.
If one piece were unwound. If you had run. If we had looked  for you
sooner. If you had screamed. If the gods had intervened...

Winner of the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award

Sanriku

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The game was not to look - but feel -
the slow drag, the distant rise
and fall, the quiet revolt of crests...

Muriel Craft Bailey Award - Finalist

Odalisque

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Early light, the chill of souls leaving. You draw up the sheet
to cover us; the soft of musk, the body's heat
from an air pocket, nudged and wayward. The scent...

Winner of the Emerson College Original Poetry Award

On Rewinding

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I have been told that by wish and will I fell from His sheep-
wool pocket into one dame's arms; and that was birth.
I have been told that angels bowl; heaven opens up when the...

Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up

The Arrangement

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Because we were getting old enough
our instructor took us to look at (not to touch)
some pictures grown men drew...

Erskine J. Poetry Prize - Finalist

Catharsis

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A portly man on TV says he’s eating jelly donuts
since his doctor recommended more fruit.  My head
tucked beneath your chin, I feel you grin. A welcome joke...

Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi-Finalist

Bad Apology

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As if in an endless rehearsal,
I packed and unpacked. The challenge,
you said, was to take no more...

Rita Dove Poetry Award - Semi Finalist

At the Grieving Parents Meeting

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In the parish hall of Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church,
pictures of murdered children in our hands,
we huddle in a sphere of folding chairs...