Fingernail Moon: A Coalcracker looks for Glassboro

This is how we come to know one another: statue by statue; leaf by leaf; fragments of ourselves, gathered and assembled into quiet initiations of 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.