Twenty-Three
The Dead Mule School of Southern Gothic Literature 2025
Prose Poetry
“I am twenty-three. Purple paint cracked under fingernails, dried in clumps in my hair, staining my fingers and toes the color of – what was it? What was I painting?”
Blessed Bones
Prose Poetry
“Rattling these blessed bones
Headache-bleeding-eyeball-migraines!
Falling in love for the first time (or Last?)”
OKOH MAGAZINE - Debut Issue Spring 2024
Platonic Intimacy
Prose Poetry
“The intimacy of each syllable;
[I-LO-VE-YOU]
It’s not physical but meta-physical”
Fruit Slice Magazine 2023
“I don’t believe in the supernatural
In a park in New York
under the stone shadow of Medusa,
she read my runes.”
Short Vine Journal 2022
Medusa
Prose Poetry
Painted Eyes
“A ripe red pomegranate was placed into my hand, the skin tensing with the supple perfection of ripeness.
“Xièxiè,” I said, bowing my head.
I entered through the curtain, and the haze of the shop cleared. The studio was black, the walls, the closed curtains, and the ceiling. Only the large chair in the center of the room was reflected in soft white light, illuminating the artist and her customer upon it. The drone of the tattoo gun paused as a bell tinkled upon my entry.
“Take a seat, I will be with you in a moment,” Tua Zhang spoke, turned towards her work.”
Flash Fiction
Grim & Gilded LITERARY MAG.
Rather Than Roanoke
Speculative Eco-Fiction
“He stood in the middle of the freeway.
The blood on his hands dripped, creating Rorschach blooms on the expanding circles of glass twisted through metal around his feet. The noise had diminished to a narrow focal point– a singular car horn honked a delayed metronome of danger as its echoes liquified underneath the overpass. A child cried in the arms of a woman; a red halo ran around her face. She walked across the fast lane, slow as her boots cracked the glass underfoot.
The man looked up at the bridge, where the silhouette had stood minutes ago. Their back had faced the sun, and the rifle in their hands had glowed against the warmth of the sunset. The figure was gone. “
NEXUS LITERARY JOURNAL 2023
Chekov’s Gun: Inanimate Yet Intimate Objects in Virginia Woolf’s Oeuvre
Critical Essay
L'Esprit Literary Review - Virginia Woolf Anthology (Indirect Books)
“The Lighthouse operates as the novel’s Anti-‘Chekov’s Gun’; the origin of the colloquialism from words of the Victorian-era playwright Anton Chekhov, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there” (1 November 1889). Woolf, in turn, puts the rifle high and far away upon the wall, out of reach yet ever present to orient the narrative; all along an empty, unloaded receptacle of meaning. The Lighthouse operates as the inexplicable meaning of life itself, as the ‘subject and object and nature of reality’ at the heart of the novel.”
THE BROOD
Speculative Fiction
“The light of the day is fading fast. The shadows grow dense and dark between the birch trunks as the seconds tick. The Point of View moves in, closer, examining the steadfast line of the forest, pivoting to look to the left, and to the right. The linear directions stretch out into each horizon, disappearing into the blue hour haze at each end. It leaves the viewer with a particular sense of otherworldly unease. The Point of View catches on a light flare below and pans down to the base of the forest floor.
A pile of clothes is neatly folded into a pyramid; pressed corduroy pants, boxer briefs, undershirt, and topped with a wristwatch and a snapped-in-half cellular device. The light glints off of the cracked watchface, split straight through the middle. It resolutely ticks on.”
Forthcoming 2026