NOTE: All work titles are hyperlinked to their original postings, unless otherwise specified.

Drunk Monkeys

Turning Point

Poem, 2022

Back at the hotel, the toilet seat
is cool as a headstone on my arms
my vomit hot on my lips.

I’m grateful no one came back
with me.   

Split Rock Review

Residents of My Rental House

Poem, 2022

This bedroom was for my son, but instead
a coiling creature sleeps here that is not a worm.
Then there is a worm, I think. A wormlike thing
in the toilet.

Touchstone Literary

Search for Me

Poem, 2021

Validate my victimization
and do not.

Prometheus Dreaming

Self Portrait

Poem, 2021

When we got the eviction notice
the one we knew we couldn’t
fight, we sold our TV, our VHS
tapes, our favorite movies.

Sunspot Lit

Never

Creative Nonfiction, pg. 35, 2021

He laughs when I sing along to Hot in Herre on the radio.

“Do you even know what that means?” he asks me, his eyes shining. Passing car lights show me he’s watching me and wanting to laugh, his dark hands lazy on the steering wheel.

“Yeah,” I tell him because I do know sort of. They’re getting naked. He’s hot for sex. I probably know more than he thinks I do.

Quiet Lightning

Anxious Attachment & Catching

Two Poems, 2021

I’m lost in the underworld
again, my Eurydice.

I’m scrolling through old pictures
Hades posted of you
when you were happy

From “Anxious Attachment”

The Dillydoun Review

Cocaine

Poem, 2021

I came home to find her
in my bedroom, her long shadow
flickering across the lamplight,
bent over a small table in the corner.

Daily Drunk Mag

Food Insecurity I

Poem, 2021

My hamburger falls to the floor,
our once-red carpet, now brown.

Button Eye Review

Rewind

Poem, 2021

Magical movies & sci-fi stories warn against
time travel, claiming butterflies have it out
for us. I’m supposed to say, Everything
happens for a reason & God’s will be done.

The Closed Eye Open – Maya’s Micros

To Know, in the Biblical Sense

Poem: “May 2021, Batch 017: 05/12/21”

I have forgotten how to pray.
When I get on my knees, my mouth
is otherwise occupied, wide, a serpent

Vocal Contest Submission

Francesca Foote

Short Story, 2021

This story was a submission to the Moleskin contest. I’m not partial to fiction, but this story came to me, fully formed, while I was driving around in my car, and I raced home to get it all down. Needless to say, this did not win the contest, but I’m particularly fond of it, so I wanted to share it here too.

I consider this for a moment: young women scantily clad and young men who will pay to see them nearly (but not quite) nude. When I was younger, I suspect if the internet had been what it is now that I may have considered this. It could have supported my journalism habit. Although, of course, Sarah never would have agreed to it.

Door Is a Jar

Red

Micro-CNF, 2021

Lying with her on her bed, her smooth shoulders still speckled with shower spray, soothes me like warm soup on a sore throat, an elixir.

Cathexis Northwest Press

Blind Light

Poem, 2021

Sunlight strips the blinds & casts them aside.

It’s the morning after.

In this blind light, his pupils make room for blue

eris & eros

Red Light; Lessons on Womanhood; We Play Detective, Not Doctor

Poems, 2020

Today we find it:
a pair of little girl’s
panties — hanging
on a branch in the woods.

from “We Play Detective, Not Doctor”

These pieces are part of a collection I’m writing called Trailer Trash. They’re about growing up in extreme poverty with a single mom with mental illness. When I write about my past, it’s important for me to go back there and write from that place instead of from this present, all-knowing-narrator voice. That’s why all three poems are written from the perspective of a child — I was a child when these things happened to me.

Flash Flood

Black Snow

Short Story, 2013

They took you away this morning, meine liebe, my love. They said you were too sick to work, unfit, unessential. And I didn’t know at the time. I didn’t know where they would take you or what they would do to you, but I knew you would not come back.

Keep This Bag Away from Children

Unidentified

Poem, 2013

This is one of the first pieces that I ever got published. The site, Keep This Bag Away from Children, gave me a virus, though, so just read the piece here, for your own safety.

Unpublished, But Worth Reading

Goodies

Short Story, 2010

As Lily tied on her red cloak, she could only stare at the goody basket on the kitchen table and remember secretly watching her mother sprinkle rat poison into the corn cake batter. The thick straw-woven basket cradled the delicate cakes, and Lily’s mother had wrapped a plain, brown cloth around them to trap the warmth inside each pastry. Lily could identify the pleasant scent of hot, melting butter wafting from the basket, but all the same she told her mother, “The cornbread smells different today. Did you put in something special for Granny?”

            “Don’t be silly,” Mother said. “You’re imagining things like always. Now run those goodies to Granny before it gets dark.”

Forthcoming works

• “Nightmares,” a creative nonfiction piece, in GutSlut’s SuicidAliens anthology, 2023.
• “Rise,” an erasure poem from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, in Moody Zine, 2023.