At Your Feet, Voice Without Audience, Steady Work, A Life Poured Out, What Remains. The unsung issue / March 28, 2026 View on the web → Welcome to The Unsung Issue, where today’s poem, The Shoeshine Man, sits just off to the side, doing its work without asking to be seen. I still find myself looking for it whenever I can, that vanishing art of a man behind a stand, cloth in hand, bringing something worn back to life. It is harder to find now. Airports rush past it. Streets don’t hold it the...
8 days ago • 5 min read
Bearing Witness, No Frills, A Day That Holds, In Exile, Looking Up, and More. The witness issue / March 21, 2026 View on the web → Welcome to The Witness Issue, where today’s poem, Sighs of the Salvadoran Coffee Farmer, stands in the fields and refuses to look away. I first wrote this piece in 2018 as a triptych, three connected panels that move from land, to place, to people, each holding its own view while building a larger whole. It has stayed with me ever since. It is one I return to, as...
15 days ago • 5 min read
March 14, 2026 Open Ground, Where Words Return, Dream Origins, Line Mechanics, Bold Voices, and More. View on the web → Welcome to The Dreamers Issue. Today’s poem, Green Dreams, follows me as a traveler on the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. The jungle, primates, and a road to the Pacific frame the journey. Yet beneath the surface, the poem carries a quiet structure of its own, perhaps even a hidden phrase suggesting dreams stand against emptiness. This issue also supports the notion that...
22 days ago • 5 min read
March 7, 2026 Barbed Wire, Words Reversed, The Pull of Stillness, Five Lines, Doorways, and More. View on the web → Welcome to The Thresholds Issue. Today’s featured poem, The Metal Silence, comes from my archives, yet it belongs here at the edge, where freedom becomes confinement and families wait between hope and loss. This is not a political poem; it is observational, shaped by my time in El Salvador. Around San Salvador, places like El Penalito remind us that thresholds are rarely gentle....
29 days ago • 5 min read
February 28, 2026 A Surprise in the Shrublands, Symbols That Carry On, Endurance in Exile, and More. View on the web → Welcome to The Endurance Issue. At the center is my poem A Surprise in the Shrublands, which reflects on what it means to stay present when risk sharpens the senses and survival feels shared. For me, endurance lives less in force and more in attention. This issue also unpacks metonymy, a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole. From Shakespeare’s “lend me your...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
February 21, 2026 Weathered Goods, Allusions, Inheritance of Words, A Persian Form, and More. View on the web → Welcome to The Heritage Issue. At the center is my poem Relics, asking what we carry, what we bury, and what quietly lingers. To me it's about the inheritance of memory and the marks left by those who shaped us. This issue also takes a brief look at allusion as a poetic device, and, because poetry never exists in isolation, I pause to note what unfolded on this day in poetry’s long...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
February 14, 2026 The Valentine's Issue: Asphalt Blooms, Say It Again, The First Valentine, A Postcard Revival, and More. View on the web → The newsletter has a new look, but it’s still chasing the same thing: moments most people walk past. Each issue now carries a theme — a way to look harder at the ordinary, the sacred, the broken, and the beautiful. This week’s poem, Parking Lot Flower, fits right in. It's about the awkward weight of love, the ways we fumble it, and the quiet beauty that...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read