Check out my newly published poem “Lantern Tree” in the summer 2019 issue of The Journal.
You can see, read or listen to it here: http://thejournalmag.org/archives/17374.
I wrote this poem in late November 2008 for David Owen Kent, aka Deva, shortly after his passing that same month. (I didn’t start submitting poems to lit mags until 2018, so I sat on this one for a good long while.) The title and some of the poem’s imagery comes from a Chinese Lantern Tree, also known as Golden Rain Tree, that grew at the end of my street in Fayetteville, Arkansas. At this time of year the tree is full of papery seedpods shaped like lanterns, each harboring three little black seeds round as pearls. At night, when the angle of the moon is just right, the pods light up, their seeds becoming backlit shadows of unknown futures. From lightness to darkness and back again … autumn, seedpods and we fall.
The summer 2019 issue of The Journal in which my poem appears is also available in print.
