I’ve been luckily enough to study with Thomas Lux, Dorriane Laux, Joseph Millar, Carol Ann Duffy (Poet Laureate of Great Britain), and others. And because I’m somewhat of a workshop and open mic junkie, I started a monthly critique group in Atlanta and a writers' night out in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’m also lucky that my poetry collection, Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press, 2014) has been called “a courageous, deeply human book” and my poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Poetry East, Atticus Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology V: Georgia (Texas Review Press), and many other places. 

Author's Note: This poem takes place on the Georgia/N. Carolina border in the Blue Ridge Mountains.


Seagull Morning, Lake Chatuge
    

I wake to a duotone picture— 
pink lake and clouds, 
gray mountains, diving gulls.

Then sunshine reaches ’round Bell Mountain, 
catches the birds, illuminates them bright white. 
More seagulls than usual this morning, 
delicate as tissues floating from the sky. 

One comes close to my window, 
rhythmic wings with black tips.
He dives toward his reflection, 
an image so clear on still lake, 
it looks like two birds will collide. 

Their morning chores complete, 
fifty or more flock harmoniously at the sandbar. 
Yet on the water, they go solo.
Each glides alone, trailing a gleaming wake.

Gulls winter here. 
Like all fleeting things, they’re special to me. 
But, in this January of record lows, 
why didn’t they venture farther south?

Maybe the birds come for the same reason I do:
to dance among mountains,
where melodies—migrated on lips and fiddles— 
still hover, preserved for gull generations
and for those who join their ancestral reel 
through crisp Appalachian air.

-published as “It’s A Seagull Morning on Lake Chatuge” in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge (2010) and Your Daily Poem, January 10, 2011