[Header Photo by Wesley Jackson on Unsplash]

On the first day of spring classes, I mentioned to one of my first-year writing seminar classes that I now live just a few minutes from my first college, Spartanburg Methodist College (SMC).

I currently live in a converted mill, one among many empty mills or mills transformed into apartments in the area around SMC, which began as a mill college.

It was in the beautiful rock building, the first-year dorm for young men, on the third floor where I recall vividly writing my first real poem; it was prompted by a combination of having read e.e. cummings in my speech class with Mr. Brannon and watching students throw a Frisbee on the lawn in front of my dorm.

That was spring of 1980, some 46 years ago. I have been a poet and writer since.

At SMC, also, I was invited by a literature professor, Dean Carter, to tutor for the course, and so, there I also discovered that I am a teacher.

Teacher and writer have been wonderful twin avocations for a redneck who grew up in the South, lived through the 1960s and 1970s as a child and teen.

College saved my life, or more specifically, saved my soul.

It is in college where I started becoming a better person. Shedding the racism and other bigotries I was raised in, both my home and my community.

I have not ventured very far physically, but I have traveled a great distance in my mind and my heart.

I still find cummings’s poetry beautiful and moving:

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility

2025, despite the horrors of the world, was a wonderful poetry year for me.

I began serving as the poetry editor for English Journal, and I had a poem exhibited at Blowing Rock Art & History Museum (see the catalogue of exhibited poems and artwork in the link), winning a second place award as well: my mother had a million faces (3 pictures).

That poem is inspired by pictures of my mother, specifically this one:

I also wrote steadily throughout 2025, so I wanted to share those here:

• someone died today
• be careful (DMZ)
• cracked
• the storyteller who lost their way
• Testaments: Tiger’s blood breath (these terabytes of love)
• i did not come
• semantic fever dream (tarot cards)
• bloodied 2:31 am
• summer tomatoes (this is how we live, this is how we die)
• i hate the rain
• we lost everything
• best friend (bruises)
• sky’s small white rock (sepulchre)
• you
• sometimes she would forget (solitary garden)
• lost & found
• then spring

• aphasia
• parenting
• shift

---