The frog chorus, not one throat smaller than a lime, sharing the dark handkerchief of the midnight sky, eyes huddled like jarred olives. My bare foot has been leapt upon. My legs cupped in ditch-scented suction. It was only a matter of time. First the synapses of my brain filled with webbing, then the spaces between my fingers. I will show you my green gloves. Never learning how to throw the moon, only how to catch it. I will bathe in algae. May I burst at the mouth, equal parts rapture, rupture, glitter, grime. Song. Psalm. Oh, fickle praise. Balancing its phrases like mile-long toothpicks on the lips of frogs.
old highway
a lone headlight
threads the calm
work has recently appeared in Acorn, Contemporary Haibun, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, and Modern Haiku. He is the author of a collection of haiku and haibun, How to Disassemble Your Father’s Ghost (Kattywompus Press, 2017), and his haibun story of the same name is anthologized in The Best Small Fictions 2015. With a fondness for whiskey and whippoorwills, he divides his time between the lights of Nashville and the woods of his native Kentucky.
