POETRY

"A Sonnet of Painted Walks" published in Illinois's Best Emerging Poets.

She walks along the dirty cobblestone,
her footsteps light against the heated rocks.
Her shadow walks behind her, left alone
to dance among the flowers made of chalk.

She passes coffee shops with pastel-faced
people consuming pastries as crumbs cake
against their lips. Buildings loom overhead, graced
with cracks that split apart from years gone baked

by rays of sun. The river rushes fast
under the bridge with sounds that escape
the crowd walking by. This is the last
untouched image she sees before the shapes

begin to change. Her eyes darken, straining,
and she again sees only the painting.

"The Reader"

A sestina is a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the ends of the lines in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern. All six of the words appear in the closing three-line envoi. The form is used in order to portray an obsessive passion with a certain object.

Her skin was the color of gold, young and sun-kissed. 
The dark silhouette of her body leaned against the glass window
as sunlight bounced off the goose bumps etched onto her skin
like Braille. Her lips were bitten, gone unnoticed, now cherry red.
Through her eyes you could see the reflection of inky black words spilled
like soul splatters onto the depths of her muddy pages. 

Her hands clung to the book like vines, fingers grazing pages
with care as they turned them one by one like slow kisses
granted to petaled lips by a gentle lover. She was in love with the spilled
guts, the broken hearts, the realities of the book. An open window
nearby allowed a gentle breeze to caress her cheek, red
blush forming as blood pooled under her skin; 

she took no notice. She was clumsy: she allowed paper cuts to dot her skin
in her haste to dip into daydreams, drowning in pages
until sleepiness dwelled in her bones, eyes drooping and red.
She rejected exhaustion, claiming that the best time to read of kisses
passed like secret notes was when darkness suffocated the window,
creating a blanket of intimacy between the reader and the words as it spilled

into the room. These words hovered through the air like flour spilled
into the atmosphere, visible, tangible, caking and plastering over skin,
soaking into her bones, mirrored on her mind like reflections on murky windows:
she was affected. And near her stood stacks of books with cracked spines, pages
wrinkled from use: marks of affection for the books that kissed
her into existence. She was a dreamer. She dreamed herself painted red

with ardor like an insensible romantic, dreamed herself soaked red
with blood, an unfortunate lover. Her malleable presence spilled
inside these favored books, savoring autumn and sweet chocolate kisses
through characters as she transplanted herself into the skins
of people meant to exist only through inked words on the page.
She had an ever-growing fondness for books because they were windows

of opportunity, allowing her to escape the reality of windowless
rooms, locked inside spaceless spaces surrounded by deep wine-red
walls. And when sleep finally had its claws around her mind, the pages’
calls silenced by the weary buzz in her brain, she allowed the blankets to spill
around her sides as she shed her personalities, reveling in the feel of her own skin.
And tucked safely by her pillow lies the most recent book blowing silent kisses

as she sleeps and dreams of its pages, white skin
bound with a red cover kept untouched and unkissed,
spilling its secrets to her mind’s window.