A church I have sat in

I recently had two poems in Sundog Lit, a journal that tastes good and is good for you.

The first poem, “Whittler,” is a poem I was particularly fond of when I wrote it, and I was disappointed after the first rejections came in. A Sundog editor asked me to change a clumsy stanza with a semi-colon like a door stop. And he was right. 

I wrote the second poem, “Flush Sky,” for a project with the Found Poetry Review. The idea was to take a text and replace some recurring words with alternatives. I took a text called “English Speakers, You Stink at Identifying Smells.” I switched ‘smell’ for ‘cloud,’ ‘speaker’ for ‘sleeper,’ and a couple other more minor words, then choose different passages and changed the order, but without adding anything that didn’t otherwise appear in the original text. 

These pencils were made by the Finnish artist Jonna Pohjalainen.