I am so very grateful to have two poems appear today in Luna Luna Magazine, a publication billed (quite accurately) as “a space for lush poetics, fever dreams, & the dark ecstatic.”
They are:
I began writing “Ritual of Astonishments” in January of 2021, and it still strikes me as a winter poem. Over nearly four years, it underwent dozens of extreme revisions (and several different titles) before I considered it finished and began submitting it to journals.
“Sonnet 4” came far more swiftly, and is about two years old. It was started on the last day of spring in 2024, and finished in (almost exactly) its current form by August that same year. I nevertheless have always associated it in my mind with “Ritual of Astonishments”, and, following the transitive property of equality, also with winter.
So there’s something extremely appropriate to me about their appearance on this gorgeous spring day in 2026, in the swanky vampire coffin that is Luna Luna, like undead sophisticates peering through their sunglasses, awaiting the sunset with its approaching safety of dusk.
So let me give many many thanks to the myriad publications who declined to accept these works (numbering sixteen for “Sonnet 4” and twenty-eight for “Ritual of Astonishments”), as their doing so allowed the two poems to appear side-by-side in such an appropriate journal.
And, needless to say, thanks to Luna Luna Magazine for being so kind as to print them.