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June Moon

Don’t rhyme “June” with “spoon,”

unless maybe it’s one

that’s bent back & tarred black,

nor “moon” with “June”

unless you mean the bug big

as a car now battering my screen.

“Soon” also is suspect.

Expect it to be the same

as when pairing “breath”

with “death” in a previous line–

the poem had better

have depth in infinite fathom

& the rhyme, at least

one reason for being

besides the chime. Time is not

on your side, friend.

The end is too near to waste

even one unstressed beat

on a repeat of anything.

 

Yes, it will take some work.

Wait, do I hear you complain?

So you impressed yourself

slant-rhyming “duende”

with “pudendum,” but look—

already been done

& more than one time. Ditto

for subbing in “dog”

for its reverse rhyme, “God.”

It’s true both are dead

so far as I know, but—never mind.

The point not to repeat

a tired trope. The point is to hope

things will be better or different

—at least try to make language new—

I triple-God dare you.

Rebecca Foust’s seventh book, ONLY (Four Way Books 2022) earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was featured on the Academy of American Poets 2022 Fall Books List. Her poems, published widely in journals including The Common, Narrative, POETRY, Ploughshares, and Southern Review, won the 2023 New Ohio Review prize and were runner-up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editors Prize.

Coronation

Crows & their eyes’ starry glint,

brassy anklets of sparrows, ruby-crowned kinglets:

among these trees all limb & lung, each is a jewel

 

churning hours, draping Earth in necklaces of song

that rain onto my bed of ringlets

black as crows & their starry glint.

 

My dark volunteers decide where they belong.

Abiding by the current of these glossy rivulets,

I shrug at the slim rings crowning my head, fussy jewels

 

I swear stand on end when the crows arrive each dawn.

Breezing from the trees (those gem cabinets)

the crows nearly appear to wink—that starry, starry glint.

 

I toss them some peanuts on the roof and lawn,

willing our adjacent lives to better bisect,

hoping they’ve glimpsed in this gesture a jewel

 

of goodness. The human shock of my face gone

softer, daily, till in beaks of black intellect

the crows carry a kinship with my own starry glint.

All limb & lung, wing & song, each of us: jewels.

Basia Wilson is a poet with a BA in English from Temple University. A finalist for the 2022 Banyan Poetry Prize, Basia’s work has most recently been published in Voicemail Poems and bedfellows magazine. Selected for Moving Words 2023, her work will soon be adapted for animation in an international collaboration between writers, animators and filmmakers with ARTS By The People.

5 x 8

Take the afternoon train toward

forgetting.

Fill the saddlebags of your Harley.

Go in peace.

 

I will wait under the birch

for the owls to cry.

 

Hitchhike to Columbus.

Carry a calico bandana full of lightning.

 

I will remember the hedgerow,

the small silver trout,

the history of icicles,

the taste of juniper berries on your tongue.

 

Pack your trunk, take your pistol,

Measure the wingspan of a barnwood flag.

 

I carry a snail in my backpack.

He chases a grasshopper

under stones.

 

Heartsick, your highway

whispers ‘tomorrow, heart,

ache’. This is a film,

twice forgotten:

a spaghetti western,

this balloon lifting

you from sleep.

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner-city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant and is currently Poet in Residence at Drexel University College of Medicine. Her newest collection, NO.HOPE STREET has just been published by Kelsay Books.

Filling Up

On a winding road this side of South Mountain

which looms beside the less and less quiet valley,

we park the Jeep just past a roadside spring

that streams from a pipe fastened to a rock.

Such an insufficient description, I know,

but you don’t need to see it, just trust

that today as we lift empty plastic jugs from the back

and pop the caps to fill up on the free spring,

I’m stuck in time, or maybe just seemingly so

because nothing passes—not a car, a bike, or a breeze,

not a sound from the songbird likely stuck somewhere

deep in the somewhere trees erectly still on the mountain.

I’m bound by the thought of us here, somewhere

in the muck of life and all that’s falling

each day—each leaf, each dripping drop, each glimpse

of sunlight reflecting from the cascade of uncertain endings.

Someday I’ll ask where this went, where it fell or what it

fell into. But if I stay here, stuck, just one moment more,

I know I’ll find a way to slip this into my pocket,

zip us up, cap these jugs, preserve the roadside spring

that begs us to drink—drink from this leaky mountain,

as if we seek the answers or even know how to ask.

Wes Ward was born in Dover, Delaware, though roots tie him back to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where his dad was raised. Now a familiar stranger to Philadelphia, Wes lives a couple hours due West of Independence Hall and teaches high school English and college writing. He earned his Master’s of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Queen Anne’s Lace

To my mother, Elizabeth Worthington Shelly

 

A coarse scatter of gravelly buds

with a bare wire undercarriage,

a stem like baling twine,

and the aroma of last night’s dowsed fire.

 

No silky petals here:

you look like the doilies old ladies lay

on the heads and arms of chairs

to soak up sweat and body oil.

 

How cruel, they named you for a queen

when you were always a working class flower,

a Depression bloom.

There was never any luxury for you:

nobody took you into their garden

to cultivate or to coax.

You grew up in worn out fields,

in ditches along the sides of roads,

nurtured on rocks and exhaust fumes.

 

And that one purple dot in your center?

The one legend says is lacemaker’s blood?

That’s yours: shed along with your last tear

before you learned never to cry again

no matter how much it hurt.

Steve Shelly lives in Devon, Pa. and has worked for many years as a psychotherapist. His poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including The Atlanta Review and Philadelphia Stories. He works as a Volunteer Guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Bic Breath

To view “Bic Breath,” by Jake Price, click HERE.

Jake Price is a sophomore student at Susquehanna University pursuing a degree in creative writing. He spends most of his time reading his work to his cat, Raven, who has yet to give him any feedback. Jake has an Instagram account where he posts his poetry, @‌nolenprice, that has amassed over 3100 followers as of writing this. His poetry has been published in Rivercraft Magazine, Poet Lore Magazine, and Sanctuary Magazine. His short fiction has also been published in Cream Scene Carnival and Querencia Press.

The Moon as an Engine of Burning

I don’t want to start with the moon

but it was gloomy outside

and there was a pale quivering light

that reflected from water

and silvered the tips of branches

leaving me little choice

even as I contemplated again

the traumatizing prospect of aging

even as I stood there on the renovated deck

considering whether to walk the avenues

in order to clear my head

or to return to my laptop

with all of the tasks that I was avoiding

and as I continued to kill time

and waste psychic energy

you appeared     backlit in the doorway

and as I watched you

the flames licked up from the bottom

of your dress and burned it away

your arms raising     and fire leaping the gap to me

and I was lost inside moonlight

inside unbreathable heat

I still remember that night after all this time

I still bear the scars

of that unexpected conflagration.

Paul Ilechko is British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Tampa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sleet Magazine, and The Inflectionist Review. He has also published several chapbooks. 

In the Golden Hour, Cormorants

We first noticed the cormorant late afternoon,

the golden hour just before dusk,

black feathers and kinked neck,

a thin hooked bill, perched

on a piling facing the house as though

watching the oxygen tanks unloaded

from the back of a truck, the wheelchair

we carried up the front stairs.

 

The next day there were more,

diving deep beneath the docks, feeding

for hours before coming to rest

one after another on pilings

until every one was taken.

A silent chorus, in their black robes,

and as the time we’d been given

shortened to a few days they offered comfort,

 

a belief that as long as they stayed

she wouldn’t die, even as she refused

pudding, sweet tea, turned her face to the wall

as we moistened her lips with a wet cloth.

The last day was quiet, the water still

until her final breath when wind

suddenly kicked up. I watched

as they rose in unison, heading south

as though ushering her away.

 

I wished them safe harbor.

I wish them safe return.

Poet, teacher, and editor, Cheryl Baldi is the author of The Shapelessness of Water and a former Pennsylvania Poet Laureate. A finalist for the Robert Fraser Award for Poetry and the Francis Locke Memorial Award, she is widely published, most recently in ONE ART: a journal for poetry. She volunteers for the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program and the Arts and Cultural Council and lives in Doylestown, PA and along the coast in New Jersey.

An Interview with Michael Brix, Executive Director of Tree House Books

From left to right, Jonathan Kemmerer-Scovner poses with Michael Brix,
Executive Director of Tree House Books.

by Jonathan Kemmerer-Scovner

I came to the edge of Broad Street, Temple University at my back, then crossed from one world to the next. It was an unseasonably hot and sunny afternoon. Down Susquehanna Avenue, a group of people were browsing through a small cart filled with books and I knew I was headed in the right direction.

I walked through the front door and into a small space overflowing with books, tall shelves which lined the walls. Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth immediately jumped out at me and I flipped through Goodbye, Columbus while in the room next door, a teacher helped children with their reading.

I put the book back just as Michael Brix, Executive Director of Tree House Books, came down to meet me.

Do you remember the first book you read that made you love reading?

The Chronicles of Narnia. My mom read that to us before bedtime. That’s always my go-to answer for that question.

I also loved the Beverly Cleary series with Beezus and Ramona, as I was also a pest. And I read a not insignificant amount of Hardy Boys mysteries that had been my father’s.

Coming down here, I realized I still think of you primarily as the head of the Yes! And… theater camp, even though that’s been five years ago now.

Yeah, that was actually the second nonprofit I’d founded. The first was The Simple Way, a community in Kensington that deals with direct relief, taking people to the hospital, providing food and clothing… It was out of that organization that the idea for a theater camp grew, because we’d partnered with UrbanPromise in Camden and a few other organizations to run a summer theater program for kids. So Yes! And…, as we called it, spun off into its own nonprofit, and that’s what I did for the next 20 years.

The entire time, however, I knew that if Yes! And… was going to continue, it needed to have different leadership that would allow it to grow beyond its founders. That was always the hope. So we worked at raising someone up internally, while at the same time I’d begun looking for different opportunities.

That’s when I found Tree House, which fit my skillset perfectly.

In what way?

All the work I’ve done in my life has had social justice as its focus. The Simple Way did it one way, Yes! And… did it a different way, and with Tree House Books, literacy is the focus. All of those things are very much connected, and that was the core reason why I felt comfortable coming here, because it spoke to that passion. The passion for social justice, and the passion for community.

For example, when we talk about expansion opportunities, we’re not talking about taking the Tree House model and bringing it to West Philly or some other neighborhood. No, we’re talking about how to grow deeper roots right here in this community, here in North Philly. That idea resonated with the leadership here, so, like it or not, that’s what they were getting with me.

How long was Tree House Books around before you came on board?

Since 2005. It was the brainchild of folks from the Church of the Advocate, a community staple here in North Philly. At the time, the Church of the Advocate had a Community Development Corp given to it by the city of Philadelphia. They wanted to use it to invest specifically in this corridor of Susquehanna Avenue.

So at the beginning, it was just a used bookstore, but then neighborhood kids started coming in and hanging out, and they developed an after-school program. They purchased the building next door and outfitted that storefront, which is where we now do our K-8 and teen programs, and all of our summer camps.

The Church of the Advocate had quickly realized that a used bookstore just wasn’t the economic engine they thought it would be. It would have closed really quickly if they’d kept it going, so they wisely pivoted to this nonprofit model, and all the classes and other activities grew organically out of the relationships between the bookstore and the people in the neighborhood.

But it’s still such a great space for a used bookstore, I see a lot of my favorite writers. I can tell just from a glance that you manage the selection seriously.

 Absolutely. We have books for children, teens and adults, and back behind us, there’s a section focused on African-American literacy – black authors, black characters, black stories – because that’s what serves this neighborhood. We want to make sure that we’re constantly stocking and featuring those titles. That’s something that we feel sets us apart.

That, and also the fact that all the books are free.

And when did you… Wait, what?

All the books in here that you see, everything on our shelves, it’s all free.

People can just come in here and take whatever books they want?

Absolutely. All told, we distribute about 88,000 free books a year. But that’s not just through this space. We also have bookshelves in area rec centers, apartment complexes and other places. We then go around on a regular basis, restocking and refreshing as needed.

Then there’s our bookmobile, the Traveling Tree House, which makes over 20 stops a week at daycares and festivals, Smith playground… they just park somewhere and put up a sign that says FREE BOOKS!

We have so many different programs, like Words on Wheels, wherein we deliver new books right to kid’s homes three times throughout the summer. Then there’s our online Book of the Month Club that people can sign up and read along with Kai. Last month, she was able to do an Instagram live interview with the author of the book, so it’s really fun and engaging.

Also, once a year, we have an event that we call Philadelphia Literacy Day, which is a whole street festival. We close down the block, invite a bunch of authors to come out and sign their books, which we then give away.

So this whole neighborhood is just overflowing with books.

One of the coolest things about this organization is that it grows just by listening to the needs of the neighborhood, but our primary mission is to ensure that people have books in their homes.

I often reference this 2019 article from Social Science Research Journal entitled “Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies.” It shows that, globally, children who are around books show an increase in their overall literacy rates, which then impacts other learning metrics.

So there have to be books in the homes that kids are interacting with. In this neighborhood, that just wasn’t necessarily the case. The impetus then became to make that happen.

Where do the books come from?

All sorts of sources, book drives, individuals, organizations, local authors… People can buy new books from our wish lists at local bookstores, kids’ books at Harriett’s and adult books from Uncle Bobbie’s. Books and Stuff, which used to have a brick and mortar store in Germantown, has also been a good partner, as well as Hachette and Quirk Books, which also bears fruit in the form of book donations. We always try to stay local, though, and away from Amazon.

We’re a part of Read by 4th, which is the overarching literacy collective in Philly, but we’re most closely related to the Book Bank, and they’re awesome. They get a lot of books out to teachers and other professionals, to help build their classrooms. They operate out of Martin Luther King Jr. High School, and Anne’s been doing that work for years, it’s a passion project of hers. I love what they do and how they do it.

So once we get the books, we then weed out any badly treated ones. As I said, we’re careful about curating books that our community needs and wants. For example, when the Traveling Tree House goes to neighborhoods that are primarily Spanish-speaking, then we need to be able to feature Spanish language books.

That’s great that you’re partnering with so many local bookstores. It seems like some of them might be upset that you’re essentially giving away the merchandise.

It’s definitely something that I stress out about, but in general, I think book lovers are a special breed of people and they get what we’re doing. We’re part of the Philly Bookstore Map Project, and I told them, we’re not really like the rest of you, but almost all of them understand that we’re mostly serving just this neighborhood. We’re not out to undercut anyone, and sometimes we can even help out.

For example, if people want to buy us new books, we have a special online-store set up through Harriet’s. She holds on to those books, which we then pick up and give away. That’s a way we can divest from Amazon and support a local business at the same time.

Wow, that’s really smart.

A lot of the stuff we do is organic. It really comes from the passions of the staff. The Book Swap festivals, for example, were my Managing Director of Programming’s brainchild. We do four of those a year, people bring books to swap, and there’s a DJ, sidewalk games, vendors… It started out as just this great pilot idea, and now it’s a major part of what we do.

But ultimately, as I said, what makes us really unique is that we’re here in North Philly. We may have all these connections and support initiatives all throughout the city, but our community outreach is located right here.

Are there plans to keep expanding?

I can’t reveal too much, but we’re looking to renovate a property in this neighborhood that we’ll be able to move into, and our hope is that we’ll then be able to serve as many as three times the amount of people than we do now.

The people I’m working with in terms of fundraising are telling me that we’re in our silent phase, which is ridiculous, because I can’t stop talking about it.

Tree House Books is located at 1430 W. Susquehanna Ave. They can be reached at 215-236-1760 and info@treehousebooks.org. Click here to donate!

The Care and Keeping of Roomba

We did not set out to be overtaken by robots.

I’d just returned from my friend’s cluttered Oakland apartment, where I’d been sent home with a promising gadget: a second-hand robotic vacuum, complete with accessories. Its gray plastic glinted newly beneath a layer of dust. “It needs floorspace to roam,” she’d said, wistful. Though less cluttered, my own apartment was far from pristine, our tile floors perpetually gritty with crumbs and dog hair. Maybe Roomba was the miracle I was looking for.

“Zach’s not going to like this,” I said.

“Oh, he’ll be fine.” I hoped she was right.

 

“Won’t they sell our floorplan to the government or something?” My husband, while hardly a technophobe, was raised by a conspiracy theorist. My reassurances that we were too boring to monitor did little to assuage him.

“It’s not even Wi-Fi compatible. Think of it as a naked Furby.”

“Fine, but what if it gets the dog?”

“It has sensors! If it bumps into him it’ll back right up. No harm, no foul.”

“Okay, but what if we trip over it and die in the night?”

“It has a charging dock and knows how to find its way back!” He looked mortified. “No, no that’s a good thing; otherwise we’d be losing it constantly.”

“Why can’t we just sweep the house?”

“I mean, we can. But I won’t.” He nodded, defeated. “And if we hate it, we can give it back.”

“I’ll give it a week,” he conceded.

 

That night, we were startled awake by an ominous WHIRRRRR in the living room.

“Do you hear that?!” I whispered.

“Holy shit someone’s in the house.”

“It sounds mechanical, like the washer is overflowing or—” I sat up, struck by a sudden realization. “ROOMBA.”

“ROOMBA?” said Zach, propping himself up on his elbows.

“I guess they had it on a timer or something!”

“Oh, for chrissake,” said Zach. The whirring continued, interrupted periodically by the sound of it gently clunking into and reversing out of corners.

“Well, whatever,” I said, catching my breath. “It’ll just tire itself out and go home.” He rested his head on my shoulder and closed his eyes.

But the whirring only got louder, closer. WHIRRRRR. CLUNK. WHIRRRRRR. CLUNK. Roomba slowly careened down the hallway toward our bedroom, navigating the alien terrain of our railroad-style apartment. It knocked against our door, which immediately swung open.

“It hungers,” I said. We stared at each other in the dim ambient light. Roomba made a beeline for the bed, our eyes widening with horror as it barreled forth.

“So, this is it,” he said. “This is how we die.”

I clung to him as Roomba slipped under the bed and began feasting on our prized collection of dust bunnies. After gorging itself on cast-off skin cells and loose dog hair, Roomba steered back toward the door.

“I guess it’s done,” I said, prematurely. Roomba scooted around the back of the door, slamming it shut and trapping all three of us, four if you count the dog snoring undisturbed at our feet, in the bedroom.

“Goddamnit,” said Zach.

 

We did not die that night. Or the next. With time, we grew accustomed to our electric boarder. Roomba was, overall, self-sufficient, but was clearly no threat to our survival. We’d find it desperately humping the threshold between the hallway’s tile and the bedroom’s faux wood for minutes on end, eventually passing out mid-coitus and establishing itself as a tripping hazard. “Please. Charge. Roomba,” it pleaded.

When its external sensors, little plastic lighthouses we set up to keep it from wandering into the laundry room, ran out of batteries, I inevitably failed to replace them. They hadn’t really worked anyway. We wandered around trying to find our automated son, only to (literally) stumble across it gagging on a fallen sock. “Move. Roomba. To a new. Location. Then press ‘Clean.’ To restart,” it demanded. A quick tug freed the offending sock from its rollers, but by the end of the day, Roomba would be back in the forbidden room slurping up fallen garments or a Truman Capote postcard. Periodically, we’d notice that the spinning trio of bristles had ceased to twirl, which meant Roomba had been just running back and forth across the apartment for days without sweeping anything new into its robo-maw. Still—after cutting loose the clump of hair tangling its mechanisms, it whirred back to life, resilient and hungry as ever.

The floors got cleaner. I tracked fewer crumbs into bed. Zach had not only accepted our new Jetson-ian lifestyle, but he begrudgingly began to enjoy it. We moved to Philadelphia and Roomba was assigned its own box. When we got the keys to our new house, a row home trashed by its former residents and a story of its own, Roomba helped us deal with the cat hair, pizza residue, and rodent excrement. When we adopted our second dog, a gleeful, but clumsy pit-mix, Roomba helped us manage the uptick in shedding. Frank the pit, taking Charlie the chihuahua’s cue, quickly learned to ignore our roving roommate, apathetic as it bounced off his sleeping form on its daily commute around the first floor. Roomba rebounded from its past love and developed a new relationship with a wooden threshold, collapsing in the liminal space between the entryway and living room when its sensors gave up on dislodging the permanent fixture. All was well.

 

I was in my cubicle when my phone buzzed. It was Zach.

“Hey, babe, what’s up?” I asked, expecting one of his midday reports about drama at work or a confusing bill we’d received, or a shift in plans for the evening.

“Hey, so,” he said, his voice simultaneously nervous and tired, “have you ever seen that meme about Roomba and the dog—”

I had seen the meme. In it, a blurry cell phone photo reveals the shit-encrusted underbelly of a robot vacuum, accompanied by a hand-drawn chart of the brown, zig-zagging path it’d taken throughout their home.

“No…” I implored. “… It didn’t.”

“Oh, it most certainly did.”

Frank, bless his heart, was still adjusting to living indoors. We mostly got to his accidents quickly, scooping the offending pile into a grocery bag and spraying down the site with enzymatic cleaners to eliminate any lingering odor. But the night before, Frank had walked downstairs on his own after we’d fallen asleep, only to find a closed door. With no yard in sight, he did what had to be done, in the kitchen. Roomba, on its never-ending quest, tried to help, but the load proved too much for its meager jaws. The turd was half-ingested, gunking up the brushes and rollers and distributing itself evenly across the house, a foul stowaway on the S.S. Roomba.

Kindly, Zach dealt with the most urgent sites, scraping and mopping the floors and airing out the stench. Roomba was set on the porch for a timeout, a child waiting for its father to come home and deliver on its mother’s threats. We debated throwing it out entirely, but something inside me refused. Perhaps it was the intergenerational trauma of my grandmother’s depression-era childhood, or maybe it was my own unique neuroses, but it felt both wasteful and cruel to dispense of our pet vacuum in its time of need. YouTube University came to the rescue with a video aptly titled “How to clean poop out of your Roomba.” The support was twofold: a friendly woman named Victoria taught me how to disassemble the device while wearing dish gloves, and 108 commenters below reassured me that I wasn’t the first or last person to encounter this dilemma.

Approximately one hour, 47 Q-tips, and a ruined toothbrush later, Roomba had been purified and was recovering on its charger. Roomba lived out the remainder of its days in relative peace, following us to a suburban rental where it had more room than ever to roam, freely gobbling up dog hair and the occasional tidy mouse dropping. Eventually, its bristled propellers stopped working entirely, and I was faced with a decision: to replace the parts and hope it would start functioning again, or to surrender and stop pouring time and money into a near-decade-old model. I packed Roomba, its charger, and its useless external sensors into a box and placed it at the end of our driveway. It was gone by the end of the day, hopefully taken in by some good-hearted tinkerer.

Roomba’s absence was painfully obvious. Within days, we were overwhelmed by dirt and dander. I’d wake up every morning congested and allergic. The afternoon light pouring through our windows illuminated every particle of filth on our floorboards. We swept constantly, or at least, as often as we could, but it was no use. Even at its most decrepit, Roomba had been the one thing standing between our livable home and total chaos.

In February, I caved and bought a refurbished Eufy RoboVac 25C for $90 on eBay. It’s Wi-Fi compatible, which worried Zach, but I promised to never connect it to our network, lest it sell our floorplan to Amazon for some unknown nefarious purpose. Without connecting it to the app, the only way to control the device is with an external remote, which has a plethora of fun buttons and allows you to drive it like a toy car, albeit an extremely slow one. It gets stuck under our couch and beneath our radiator covers, it chokes on the occasional piece of string, and it has an incurable urge to hump the metal edging that lines the linoleum portion of our kitchen, which I find nostalgic. Despite its flaws, our floors are cleaner than ever. As we say at Passover each year, “dayenu,” which means “it would have been enough.”

I know its name is Eufy Robovac, but I’ve been calling it Roomba as a sentimental tribute to the fallen. Unlike its predecessor, it cannot speak, emitting simple beeps in a sequence decoded in the handbook I haven’t read. It’s the only member of my family that never answers when I call its name—Dayenu.

Julian Shendelman lives with his husband and two dogs near Philadelphia. After pursuing—and ultimately abandoning—an academic career as a queer/trans theorist, Julian turned his attention to re-establishing his writing practice and community. His poetry chapbook, “Dead Dad Club,” was published by Nomadic Press in 2017 and his creative nonfiction has appeared in Bat City Review. He’s been a fellow at the Lambda Lit Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ Writers (2012) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2022). When he’s not freelancing, he’s running Collective Lit.