PolterGEIST, a sad shopping mall, and sunflowers

Just a few good news items I want to share:

I won Geist magazine’s PolterGEIST contest earlier this summer with a story titled “Night Drive.” The story begins, “As I drove through that forest late at night, midway, midlife, ghastly fate appeared in a deer’s guise…”

Then my poem “Some Revelation” was shortlisted in FreeFall magazine’s 2025-26 poetry contest. Here are the opening lines: “Once the jewel of my hometown, the mall suffered just/ as Yeats foretold: things fall apart, our centres cannot hold.”  The poem will be published in FreeFall’s next issue.

Lastly, please check out the current issue of Blank Spaces, a richly illustrated magazine from Grey County in southern Ontario. I have three poems published there, including “Consider the Sunflowers.” The first stanza reads:

Having considered the lilies of the field,

kindly turn to the August sunflowers

slumping by the backyard fence.

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