The black Lab in this poem, Chrissie, belonged to our parents' best friends, the Coffrens; our cousins-by-choice, Tracy and Frankie, were tasked with clearing her of parasites after she had been gone for hours on romps in the meadows and underbrush of rural Poolesville. These kinds of

My parents moved out of our house in Germantown, Maryland in the mid 2000s. I can still Zillow-stalk it from the last time it was on the market; the photos of my former childhood bedroom are unrecognizable now. Foundation Settling Alone in my box of night,  the uppermost room

Here is another poem inspired by Topsail Island, North Carolina, where I spent a week each summer of my childhood with my family and friends. One year we were fortunate enough to participate in a loggerhead turtle rescue at a nest site a few steps away from the cottage where

I was a Boy Scout in suburban Maryland in the 80s. I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the organization; I really did enjoy camping and being outdoors, but I resented the paramilitary "ranks" that seemed required for ongoing membership. I never progressed beyond "

Here's an early poem, one of my first publications, that I wrote about my Boston terrier, Harvey. Like many of his breed, he had a big personality in a small package. One of his more quirky traits was his nightly routine of digging a nest in the covers,

This poem is based in a vivid experience I had with my friends in Topsail Beach, North Carolina, back in my college days. Every summer my parents would rent a cottage on Topsail Island, and as the years went on, the house and the guest list got larger; one year

Here is another poem (like "Anatomy of a Five-Lined Skink") where the speaker seeks visual analogies among different natural textures, colors, and materials. Pelican The endless sky above the sea is a web of crossing flight paths— gulls, sandpipers, kingfishers, the occasional crow, somehow out of place.

People in my family, inexplicably, tended to use "vulture" and "buzzard" interchangeably, even though a buzzard is a bird of prey, while the bird I'm describing here is a scavenger, the turkey vulture. They seem to have grown more and more common in Maryland,

This is another poem that has me pondering how my own memory and perception work, and the possibility that the vivid images I have in my mind don't represent my real experiences. On the Atlantic coast where I grew up, large and exotic-looking critters were rare, but

As someone who has been diagnosed with ADHD late in life, I have had a hard time reconciling my past experiences with this new (to me) lens of neurodivergence. When I reread past poems like this one, which I originally wrote when I was in my 20s, it becomes much

Crossing the dim threshold from bright Independence Avenue is like a special effect of time: I can’t focus immediately, the scene bends and wobbles as if distorted by heat or reflected in a wind-skimmed pond. My older body is reverent where it stands, always smaller in dream and

A crumb of dirt, at first glance. Dark fleck amongst white bird-speck and grill-ash. Then a headlong twitch forward fifty bug-lengths in half a blink, close to my hand in its gigantic clumsiness, all wrinkle and knuckle. Then it is on me. Microscopic furry glove with three