In the summer of 2023, I was at an artist residency and we went for a drive up a mountain to do a sunrise hike. The roads were wet and the vehicle slipped off the road. After a couple of hours, we were rescued. I wrote this poem the same day, and the photo was taken after the boy (in the center) pulled our SUV free.

Read “Leaning” here.

This poem describes an incident in July 2019 when Amy and I were in Cortona, Italy. This photo is from that walk, taken just before the incident.

Read “On Our Walk to Le Celle” and other poems in The Bombay Literary Magazine

I am still trying to understand the world and the people who occupy it, which I explore in this prose poem in Issue 15 of Birdcoat Quarterly.

Read To Find Out What the World Is here.

Having cancer is not an experience I ever would have chosen, but it is a valid and strangely life-affirming one. This poem was nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize.

Read “Weighing the Options” here

Stanzas for the End of it is about the end of a romantic relationship but it is also an attempt at Sapphic stanzas.

My poem in the Atticus Review’s new triquarterly format! Nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize and the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology.

Read The First Man I Slept with After My Husband

Three poems in Hole in the Head Re:View: Sestina for the Repressed, Teenagers Making out in Rose Hill Cemetery, and The Morning After My Bilateral Mastectomy,

This poem is a response to an ongoing "Word Challenge" series at Eclectica in which poets must write a poem containing four pre-chosen words. The words for this challenge were: BORROW, PHONE, LOST, and NOTHING.

Link: Text Message

I wrote this poem while sitting beside the river in this picture, which I took while in residence at The Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. 

Link: Guilt Free and Learning to Read a River

I wrote this poem at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota, after a minor biking accident, and I took the photo of lilacs along the bike trail to town.

Read How Quickly the Body Forgives

This poem is based on something my siblings and I witnessed as children. I am honored that One Sentence Poems nominated it for a 2017 Pushcart Prize.

Read Michael Meyerhofer’s review of “The Fire Next Door” in Red Fez magazine

Doxorubicin, one of the chemo drugs I took for my cancer, is nicknamed "The Red Devil" because it is bright red and has horrific side effects. Obviously, we need a cure for cancer, but we also need less toxic drugs to treat cancer patients.

Read The Red Devil

I wrote this pantoum at I-Park in June 2016, and I'm thrilled it found a home in Muse/A Journal. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Mercer University Press in 2018.

Read: What Hurts

This poem was selected as Deep South Magazine's poem of the day on April 25, 2017.

Link: Where I Come From

This poem appears alongside "Reflection" and "Everything, Just Noise" in The Wild Word Issue #15: And So We Love (2017).

Link: The Miracle of Hands and other poems

Poem about my grandmother making biscuits, published in Whale Road Review, Issue 6 (2017). 

Link: Something Closer to Joy

Poem published alongside "My Younger Sister Riding Shotgun" in Juxtaprose Literary Magazine vol. 10, December 2016.

Link: Two Poems by Sara Hughes

Companion poems, "At Twenty" and "At Sixty," published in Eunoia Review on October 7, 2016.

Link: At Twenty

Link: At Sixty

The controlling image for this poem was inspired by a "poem-in-a-bottle" project I conducted at I-Park in June 2016. I wrote the poem in one sitting and it was published in One Sentence Poems on September 2, 2016.

Read: A Simile for His Name

Poem first published alongside "My Father Counting Change at Closing" in Right Hand Pointing Issue 99: Bone Fire (2016). Web.

Link: My Twin Sister in the Print Shop