Pretty Thunder Poetry

A poetic field station for the ungoverned, herbal, and halfway human.

“How we turn corners in the mind without warning.”

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“Even the morphine is lonely. Even the cocaine wants a forest. Remembers home.”

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“You will lose whole languages to grief.”

Welcome

This is a house of medicines and poisons.
What is kept here has properties.
Medicine and poison share a border.
Both are accounted for.

I keep a record of flora, fauna, dose, and aftermath.
Incantations, hustles, apothecary scraps, and remnants for those who walk with both the living and the dead.

Witness Statement

I write poems and ritual texts for the forgotten, the ungoverned, and the unrepentant. My work honors the unsaid, the shadowed, and the medicinal-what roots, what scars, what refuses to be buried. I believe poetry can be a kind of divination, an offering, a reckoning-a talisman that can replace your identification, your passport, your given name.

My writing has appeared in various literary publications and two anthologies. and I am the author of Talisman: A Novel of Amnesia, as well as several unpublished sequences, field guides, and altar-texts in progress. I often work in hybrid forms, crossing the boundaries between incantation, confession, and wound-document.

I write from the edges, not the center. I am not here to explain myself. Only to witness, to record, and sometimes to burn it all down.

I live in the deep woods of Northern California, on the native land and home of the Kashaya Pomo, with my family and two dogs, Rosie Farstar and Ilumina Holy Dog. I am formally initiated into ancestral lineages, a lifelong student and practitioner of herbal and ancestral medicine.