A dark tale of survival and sacrifice. Published in Gone Lawn, Issue 55 (2024) The Girl Who Went South (Gone Lawn, 2024) is rooted in the style I call Gothic Escapism, blending moody and fully immersive settings with deeply personal themes. This story explores the complicated bond between a mother and daughter, touching on codependency and the weight carried by parentified children—kids who end up taking care of themselves or stepping into adult roles too soon. It’s a mix of raw emotion and haunting imagery, where the landscape mirrors their tangled relationship. The piece reflects my fascination with how love and obligation can blur, and how children navigate the need for independence while feeling tethered to their caretakers.

This poem was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. Self Portrait of the Poet Holding Her Heart’s Dilated Left Ventricle (Stone Circle Review, 2024) was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize and is one of my most personal works. The poem wrestles with the layers of living with a terminal heart condition while being a mother and navigating the late-found joy of love in my second marriage. It’s about the strange, fleeting nature of time—how it feels both urgent and elastic—and the way I’ve learned to compartmentalize these overwhelming truths. In writing this, I explored the idea of creating a second self, a kind of emotional double, to survive and keep moving forward while holding all these contradictions at once.

This poem won 2nd place in the 2022 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize for HoCoPoLitSo. Blue Irises, which won 2nd place in the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize for HoCoPoLitSo, is a poem rooted in the delicate balance between grief and joy. It reflects on the birth of my son, his time in the NICU, and the haunting memories of that summer—a season when not every baby made it. Their absence has stayed with me, and this poem becomes a way to hold their stories.

Published 2024 in BULL. Collision Theory, published in BULL (2024), delves into the tensions between toxic masculinity, fleeting tenderness, and the shadow of loss. The story is deeply inspired by the men in my family, all of whom were Pipefitters at Bethlehem Steel before the mill closed. Their lives, marked by the grueling demands of blue-collar work, shaped my understanding of masculinity—its toughness, its silences, its toxicity, and the rare but profound moments of vulnerability.