Fingernail moon: A Coalcracker Looks for Glassboro

This is howwe come to knowone another:statue by statue;leaf by leaf;fragments of ourselves,gathered and assembledinto quiet initiationsof discovery.Many years ago, I traded the culm banks and Company houses of a small Northeastern Pennsylvania borough for the stockade fences and manicured lawns of a suburban vinyl village in Southern New Jersey. As time passed, I came to discover within myself a kind of spiritual homelessness.These poems are the results of a year spent in quiet, attentive evening walks through the streets of our neighborhood-a reaching out to the Spirit of another place... and a deeply personal encounter with its rhythms, its hesitations, and its unexpected graces. In opening myself to its idiosyncrasies-and offering a few of my own in return-a subtle exchange unfolded: a conversation carried by intuition, silence, and mutual recognition.What lives in these pages is not a recollection of what was, but a record of what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to welcome-and be welcomed in.