Poetry
The Calling Sea
Una corriente extraña fluye através del océano Atlantico. A veces mas fuerte que el viento. (Ponce de Leon, writing in 1513) Under the morning mist of a tree, a shady mahogany in a grocery parking lot, the island’s only store, is where a few old men meet, just as they met many weekends before—going to …
Letná’s Chorus
Sometimes I wake up so sad. This morning I had to force myself to put on my boots, to leave my room. Outside my door I find the city cold and brewing with busy city people walking fast. I, too, walk fast toward the river. Across one of its many bridges to a place with …
Day 9
I see a glass of gin unmixed, remembered still in the bottle, still on the shelf, still through rumbles of road crumbled still. The birds revisit cautiously, their twitters filling the air— short sentences, as if letters are pumped with the value of gasoline, in flux. They come from the earth, as do we return …
Country
The grass in Indiana grows pale and tall, like a crowd of gangly children conforming to the storm. The wooden slats of houses, sheds, and porches breathe. Their backs arch outward together in delicate and heaving rhythm, with the weight of ghost stories. This is the promiseland, where people can return their fingers to …
Bluebells of Calabria
Bloom like dresses, the colors yes, the colors, of lore and light like the sky, immortal blue. The streets of Calabria have sheep, and like the earth caresses, so do I. The colors diffuse in the atmosphere, asphalt. The flowers of your tree, the god tree, are the universal language: verrà la parole di verità …
Do You Know What a Wildflower Is?
Growing up, I spent summers with grandma. On our little island, I spent time alone in the woods and at the cove, climbing trees and naming bees. I was friends with the crabs and knew where the starfish lived. I caught quarter-sized jellyfish in mason jars and watched them glow, in the dark, sitting on …
Summer Evenings in Virginia
With sticky popsicle hands and chlorine filled hair, we kissed the sun goodnight and waved hello to the moon. Fauquier County lacked all but magnificent views. Flickering lights appeared against the canvas of night. Our bare feet frolicked through dew covered grass as we caught lightning bugs and shared them with each other. We …
Granddaddy’s Onions
I come from generations of Carolina soil, red-dirt roads, back-country Virginia. Ancestral apple orchards, onion picking—my genetic markers, some kind of backwoods double-helix tying poverty to potential. My granddaddy never went a day without mud on his boots, hands rough and chapped from picking Vidalia onions, a hunger for knowledge coursing through his …
The Rutabaga
The rutabaga has other names: swede, neep, turnip, snagger. But we prefer the first—it rolls off the tongue. An offspring of the cabbage and the turnip, this root vegetable was conceived across the world from us, in Scandinavia. Stories differ on how it came to be in England, but in the United States it sprang …
Kitchen Sink
Immaculate, save for that peach ring around my drain. My mother washes our apples in bleach, one to ten, like ingested camp dishes. Bananas come wrapped in peels, come wrapped in Saran Wrap, and carrots come in nothing at all. Clean, save for that beige crust on my plate, sent through the dishwasher four times …
Claustrophobia
I knew she wanted to shame me when she asked about my greatest fear. I first thought of a small cage, thick bars, locked door, but I knew there had to be a key. I then thought of a cell, thick bars, locked door, and I knew the same was true. A lock means a …
In this One, I’m the Frightened Rabbit
I. Meanwhile the bridge is falling out from beneath me while a rabbit narrowly skirts my tires: a fast reflex to survive. And I hold my breath in the throb of my lungs, white-knuckle the steering wheel in order to remain alive, shaking high above the roars of a gushing river. I notice there’s no …
Lady
At the lip of Manhattan, the wind makes our hair seem immature. The sky is dark with fat stars preening themselves for dangerous centuries ahead as if beneath ice. You’re eating glazed shrimp, tail and face. My glass of water is murky. The air scolds. I wanted to be a clamshell with something beautiful inside, …
After, when cigarette smoke is a ghost kissing the window screen
The record needle lowers, presses lovingly into each groove, bouncing slowly, making honeyed sounds that linger above tangled bed sheets, lightly lick the ceiling, and brush away the cooling sweat in my curls. When his mouth smiles against my middle-of-the-night skin, I can hear his beard scratching across my cheek, feel calloused fingers drag across …
Read More After, when cigarette smoke is a ghost kissing the window screen
As I Drive to Our First Date
Sydney waits for me in Crowfoot Coffee House. The chairs in the shop huddle for warmth as snow blurs the scene of passing cars outside the window. Through the wall of glass, vehicles melt into blurs and streaks of red and blue, cutting through the curtain of falling white. She sits. I drive with fogged …
In an alternate universe, my poems bloom from joy
and in them, Ryan Gosling finally texts me back; he wants to hook up, press me against the nearest wall, leave Rorschach love marks on my neck. and in them, I’m the roller-skating champion of the world, skating at cheetah speeds like I dreamed when I was ten, skating infinite circles in our unfinished basement. …
Angels
Ah, yes, the swans. I have seen them all my life but not until I crossed the Charles Bridge at night did I notice their pearly wings in black water, lit by moon’s light, angels of the night. This old city breathes heavy. Its green domes and hundred spires are old now its statues heads …
On the Run
The warm yellow lights of metro cars and white–knuckled fists holding red bars are no replacement for a descending sun. Because I’m always on an underground run, I have yet to see a Prague sunset. There will be more gold than red, I bet. I hope there’s more gold than the shining, gilded churches. A …
Four Months In
Sunsets have fallen victim to subscription: three dollars self-service paid in exact change. I watch ours through found hours, fingers twined through yours, misnomered as Pantone streaks the sky. I saw us neutral and chaste in front of a Malibu Metro PCS, chain gas station, youth enamored, unarmored. In the dream house; it falls together …
Dollar Store Jesus
doesn’t judge like those old Baptist Church ladies when they learned my dad loved Grey Goose more than Sunday sermon. He doesn’t stop inviting us to church barbeques or Christmas cookie bake sales, but that’s okay. I never really liked the leathery hamburgers or oatmeal raisin hockey pucks anyway. He doesn’t judge when …
South Victoria Avenue and Telegraph Road
The block was hot and my mouth was dry. I walked to the Corner store to buy an iced tea. Remembering the tales they told me. Stories of homies stealing forties for they shorties. I never believed them because this time, like last time, I count—one, two, three, four— workers staring at me when I …
Conesville, 1978
The cabin was built by the hands of four men, one of them her father. She was young when the house was erected: pigtails, Keds, a flowery skirt. They didn’t have much. The couch came from the waiting area of an airline; one of the men was an airline mechanic. Their dining table …
Gypsy Girl, 1957, Oil on Canvas, Jaroslav Vožniak
Romani girl, your blue shirt turned green because of your thin, yellow cardigan. Surprise in your eyes. Pulled the wrong card again. These cycles are hard to break and hard to bend. They identified you as “special” in school. Little did they know, those teachers who failed you. Czech twisted your tongue, but with Romany …
Jan
For Jan Palach How senseless an act of self- immolation first seems. To die so painfully, pointlessly. One man can’t change a whole regime, they say. Yet here we are, saluting his grave. To live without freedom of thought is not to live at all. He did not cause himself to fall.
Modern Medusa
If Gorgons lived in 2020, Medusa would slay with a headful of gorgeous, writhing snakes in every shade of grass, moss, forest, and emerald green with one accent lock of black mamba framing her smooth, Grecian cheeks. She would walk freely in knee-high gladiators, a billowing off-white dress evocative of cirrus clouds, and she would …
For a Turkey Sandwich, 1945
It was November in New York City, and the sky was tainted by only one cloud. People were a bustle of makeup and costumes, some unfamiliar with an event this size. My grandfather,16 at the time, was something my mother would later come to fear: a clown. It was the Annual Macy’s …
Middlin Magic
The winter I was sixteen, our freezer was more empty than full. I remember wishing that freezer was magic, that every time I opened it, our dinner for the next five nights would appear. Instead of wishing for a car or a new cell phone, I wished for chicken breasts, chicken nuggets, frozen …
Blink
as in to teleport away from the decay of this world’s veins. as in the time it takes ghosts to traverse the planes. as in the flicker of light when even the brightest stars grow sick and wane. as in fluttering eyes expelling the caustic burn of acid rain. as in to erase behind the …
Murder in Apartment 30
Never let the acoustics of a bathroom fool you into thinking you can keep time and tune. I tell you, I can kill it on the shampoo bottle and I call it murder in Apartment 30 because I decimate the soap-scum stage. Whims and wishes walk on the promenades of our minds, reinforced and …
Orion’s Lament
We have both fallen to death for goddesses, but only one of us reigns over the void with drawn wrath, though in the east one may only spy that which hefts his trousers; he meanders across the black bowl with a hollow heart in search for she whom he will not attain, he is fractured …
Farm Hand
Start slow because it’s hard to wake before the dawn, but even in the dark someone depends on you. First, take the dog for a walk across the lawn; stride along the fence line and enjoy your view. Stop before you meet the yellow jacket nest sleeping in the ground, hidden by the way. …
51 North
Because I can’t differentiate between Sedona and Camp Verde our destination is never clear, we’re only closer by the three-minute-fast car clock. If you smell a skunk or hit a deer, you’re getting there. Javelina could be anywhere. Because I cannot understand traffic, I feel the world crushing us in a vise, half-Camry, half …
In a Sentimental Mood
I. What else can be done than listen to bloated nature? Its fluid consistency: some sort of masculine fleece or livid crocus, blending in with the blips in the night. The crickets still chirp; they’ve been up all night again, the bastards, roaming the homelit streets and short-cut lawns. Somenight, their cries might stop: A …
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
A family of glassblowers, a river road unturned to loam. Sing the molt to second skin, layer, the wings found on our lawn like petals before fruit. In spring, in bloom, in lantern given by a child, in light flimsy as wax paper, come violent as storms in youth, come melancholia yellow lilies thrown at …
An Egg (1910)
Rose is Regina when she is born in Budapest and before one war and another she is two or three years old she looks out the second-floor window her wealthy downstairs neighbor’s breakfast alfresco the wealthy girl her opulent soft- boiled egg spills its solid gold yolk it’s sunlight the porcelain cup puts it back …
Rags (c.1925)
The stubborn fabric is seizing around the needle its obstinate refusal sends laughter through Rose the school didn’t want a Jew anymore but the Torah unravels itself for her the ark opens in a flash of light her father holds the magnifying glass here Esther defeats Haman here Miriam her watchful eye Rose won’t sit …
Pretending (c.1940)
The little that Joseph recounts of Czechoslovakia includes the black magic of his blond hair blue eyes as admission to a Nazi Party meeting their agenda he imagines any exemption we have so much respect here we are safe here silently Jews Emrick and Walter will be fake Lutherans go to fake Lutheran school learn …
i refuse to sonnet, but love
1. you fill the canvas i paint love softly blushing i am your pigments. 2. my mind is beside you there is no distance the atlantic ocean evaporates there are two countries two cities then only us i like imagining you with me looking eyes into the eyes caressing the other lost in the …
That Dance Move’s Gone Forever
Is what you told me with my ear in your teeth, you had stopped spinning but Prince didn’t get the memo and he continued even as we stood clinging; I tried then to remember how you spun, how your forearm felt, the weight of your foot on mine—it’s all going away too fast. Which fingers …
Taste and See
Whenever she eats a naan bread, she is inside the out of herself. She chews—and chews—and lives alone and beneath, as an essence under your eyes. No, your nostrils. No. Your mouth. So which of you would believe her if she told you each day she throws those limbs of hers into a blender, power …
Ode to Odes to Love
Ode to Love Ode to Fucking Up Ode to the Sound of Music of chandeliers crashing like cars of the midnight bell Ode to the breakups and the …
rose bushes
dearest [ ], I found your pin underneath the rose bushes where we laid together. (cold, hard dirt on my back, thorns digging into my spine) The petals crinkled under my hands. (dust kept coating my tongue) All the garden is losing it’s green now. I try to think of you when I watch the …
She is Void
Noetic in essence, exhaustingly dependent; a dissociative abyss, navigated solely by sentiment. You will tell her to seek treatment. She will tell you she is, and she has, and she always will. There is no ignorance in what is chronic. There is only the bleak realization of the discursive dialectics of the horrid mind.
Remember that one?
Do you remember That school shooting In that specific state Where that deranged killer Massacred those innocent victims? It was the one when He just unloaded Countless magazines From his AR-15 Indiscriminately. It was the one that Nobody saw coming. It was the one that There was no way to stop. …
After the Party
When you’re around, I call my ghosts by their first names because you don’t believe in them and I’m determined to prove we can exist together. Sometimes you ask me to read out loud to you and I imagine myself opening my mouth and a thousand voices spill into cupped hands. I imagine myself …
My Heart is a Gun
My heart is a gun. I have a permit, but it makes you nervous when you see my gun in public. You’re certain there’s a bullet with your name on it, but the bullet’s for me. Any minute now your name will be in my brain forever. Can a bomb come from the heart? Is …
MAGNOLIAS
Mid-spring, we’d step into our magnolias, branches like a many-armed justice, dark columned trunks brandishing the drilled- in patterns of woodpeckers. They held us as we stretched our wildly bruised legs, leaned exhaustion against their beams, sorting the mysteries of our boyhoods, the mingled lies of parents and priests. Our wrestled explorations with the …
Around the World
Ruminations on Picasso’s Guernica How quick the damned of Guernica try to flee the asymmetry of casualty and the fire’s opened mouth masticating at their jagged flesh, how congruent the geometry of one hundred thousand pounds of explosive ordinance tessellating into them like bread, leavened with yeast and soured with corruption, being thrown into a …
A Short Movie
I’m brushing my hair and my friends have guns in their mouths. They’re making knots of barrels, sucking bullets – they’re flirting with me, all of them. They wink, use tongues to pull triggers. The dead friends stand and new friends drop out of dead friends’ mouths. The new ones talk: …
An Old Jew Hearing Der Ring After Many Years of Silence
Woden, mad berserk and hopeless drunk, Whose revenging dreams stalked that soma— That mead of poetry, that dark and esoteric truth— Gave a superstitious eye to prefigure even the ravens. There’s blood in mead. Only sight can trade for sight. Like the wax which screams at the weight of a needle, Transcribing truth upon the …
Read More An Old Jew Hearing Der Ring After Many Years of Silence
A Natural History of the Mind
I create islands in my mind spontaneously according to random whims. I conjure biomes and terrains, raw landscapes of saw tooth mountains cross-cut with indiscriminate rivers ejecting boulders and dragonfish over basalt cliffs to a primordial ocean by the second, lands where strife unfolds in its unremarkable forms of predation on winter-stricken highlands …
Stems
the unfortunate – sadmen – my gas station earrings – you didn’t see the future in hints – the world exploded at the kitchen sink – left daffodil stems – colliding into – stacked disappointments – collections of memories per person – tabs on where we’d end – liked gas station earrings …
Shut Up or Sing
I abhor the noncommittal crooners of the world, housing hummingbirds behind dentin bars and vibrant lips where their languid tongues lie heavy-laden with forgotten lyrics and flat notes. Shut up or sing. Expand your diaphragm and lyrical vocabulary and release the deadened songbird locked within your ribcage. Exchange your borrowed breath with the wind, fly …
Ancestors
Somewhere past the planted pines and under the veil of quilted sheets. There lies a riverbed. I am buried there. Along with my pots and pans and scattered bits of bead. With the roly-polies and arrowheads. Deeper than the limestone caves and round like the wind. Don’t tell me we are not our memories. We …
Acadia, Nocturnal
The fog is shrouding tamarack and a flawless black sky as frogs trill from turbid pond water, but she doesn’t know. She emerges from our room only to eat and ask whether Andromeda chose to show over Cadillac Mountain or if Venus sailed down the Penobscot out into the Atlantic. I avert my eyes …
The Particulars of Theredness
Outside I watch a waitress through the diner of windows she’s in yellow in the middle of the night Debacled in sameness, placed particulars Serve platters of tuna on rye …
[Un]Defined, [Un]Labeled
Red nails, plush lips, long skirt wrapping wide hips, 42D, 5-foot inch 3. Unquestioned, your man is me. With him, a man, as our lips softly meet. With her, a woman, as our hips touch and our tongues greet. I wish for your firm lips and warm body, but your bed is left …
Animalistic
People look most peaceful when they eat, shit, fuck, kill the need to answer their alarm clocks in the morning, flay themselves of their suits— the artificial hides of the bull market—on the coat racks of meat lockers to linger in their earth-given nudity, and still, people look most peaceful when they drink, piss, bleed, …
Grandma Allen
Her arms were supple and reminded me of the soft bread dough I pinched as it swelled in her kitchen. She pressed butter-covered marshmallows and rice into teddy bear molds I can still taste, and nothing now compares. Colorful jars adorned her kitchen countertop, bottled pears of pink, of green, of blue. …
Unknown
*Series of haiku A tribute to the soldier buried at Camp Floyd Cemetery, Fairfield, Ut vertical white stone a shield deeply indented curving words imply loneliness glimmers forgot in winter’s frost, cold like steel, alone, lost light cracks across grass, day breaks like brittle bones, heat burns in mourning sun warmth caresses rock moisture thaws …
(Ass)=U+Me
there’s a guy that sits at the intersection of MacArthur and Fairmont in a black leather jacket and black leather hat, never smiles until one day I’m holding a Fleetwood Mac record in my hands and he stands up off his crate and yells “Fleetwood Mac is the shit!” …
INTENT
I. what does this mean: that this destruction will be radical? what does it mean, when the idea of a gesture, like a single hair fallen from the head, becomes the field of a problem? this impression of being seen: the center of the spider work of facts. II. but the fact is: your breasts …
Daybreak After Nightfall
When noble dawn arrives After a lecher of a night— A night that feels Like the millionth coat of paint On a wall that never existed— It seems the weight of one more day (For what is a day but a shade, A kind of color that bleeds into the last and the next) Might, …
What are Chickens For?
I’d like to have a chicken as a therapist, but only if the chicken has a PhD. But only if the chicken is funny and fond of dental floss. (Maintaining oral hygiene is a hobby of mine.) I want to know who chickens dream about. I want to know how it feels to floss a …
SIX METAPHORS FOR SUICIDAL IDEATION
1: The flowers rot on the windowsill. I never expected to be the person who needed reassurance that they are loved, but it terrifies me to think about waking up without the stench of decaying roses. I am too afraid to ask for new ones. 2: I want to believe that there …
The Perfect Goodnight
The noise never changes. Not quite the stroke of midnight, Not quite the hour of day; It’s traffic, restless motion. There’s time for that. There’s time for money And time for duty, A time for obligations And a time for necessity. But, right now? Now is the time to sit and listen, …
They Held God’s Funeral
</em> <!DOCTYPE Hymn> <Hymnal> <head> <title>They held God’s funeral</title> on the Saturday after He died. </head> <body> They had long since known He was terminal. <h1>His first Son asked him if He was afraid to return to the place from whence He came. God said no. God said: </h1> <blockquote>I knew it was over when …
groundless
when nightfall sheathes your eyes and surrenders sight to sound, can you hear the red-breasted songstress housed within your bosom, drumming against your cage, beating against your chest? can you feel the vibrato of her muffled freedom-song, seething the rivers rushing beneath your flesh, pulsing earworms through your skull? lifetimes ago, when ions were …
Razors and Canals
1 Dawn percolates into storm. The concrete fishing pier a straight-razor edge up, ready to shave time or cut me in two. I pass homeless people quieter than the fish for whom Mexicans and Asians put out lines I pass in hope to snag my aloneness in the roiling …
A GOOD WALK
onedaynine The earthen pier curls comma-like from the land. Better yet, it’s an apostrophe marking possession, converting the loch into a word absorbed in water. At its barbed end, a girl takes up handfuls of rock, the substance of its body, and chucks them with machine-like precision, a whirling varmint raising holy hell. I …
Cat Hour
from East/east/west Hot pavement witness: the gypsy-cursing funeral-converted Cadillac, hatchback wide open outside city hall, a haunting moan through the century like the train over Monroe. The sun, day peaked, as everyone opens doors, leaving their office on a single track there and back, for lunch, for post, for bank – or …
The People’s Temple
My best friend Christine has read three books on Marxist theory, and owns more books on religion than my father, a priest. Jim Jones was also an avid reader of Marx, though he created his own religion, something Christine is far too lazy to do. Her dog Ruby got out on the same day Anton …
The Sounds of Ash
The wind carries whispers, words unsaid, and now I know it rasps from my father’s voice. We let him go from a monolith, on the slope of a world, with a city like a bonfire—an ember nucleus nestled in twigs and logs and leaves— below. The sound dins from the grains of desert …
Unstructured Observations, Introspection, Exposing Actors
Acclaimed assholes always act after aggressing Bouncing breasted, bubble butted, B-movie beauties. Beyond Cat-calls, ‘cause crude call-outs can’t cause crooked consent. Despite defiling demure dames, downfall’s disdain doesn’t deter derelict dicks’ Exonerated edicts. Everywhere, everyone, especially entertainers encroach every Female, flashing fame for a fast fuck for four failed films. Going, going, gone, great going, …
Read More Unstructured Observations, Introspection, Exposing Actors
Matron Misery
Motherliness masked Mama’s mentally manipulative manner My mother misunderstood me Many moments Mama muttered “Mama makes men” Ma’dear misled Mama Mama misbelieved misogynistic, …
One Ramadan
8 hours later: On the day of the nightclub shooting I held myself, alone, in a house of six. 15 hours later: When the lowered sun dimly lit the Masjid’s asphalt, my lips were sealed, lest my grief be revealed. 5 days later: Every week he slammed terrorists on his mimbar, but today, not a …
Deciduous Dreaming
A stack of turtles sleep atop my dresser Resting somewhere between peace and panic Across a page split down the middle A creek caresses the cricks of their shells From higher than my vision believed Trickling washed words and shallow lines And steadily eroding the space between A fall of words ricocheted and …
BENEFICIAL NEMATODES FOR TILLED SOIL AND GARDENING
You should not have opened this box. Now you will never be rid of me. I am waiting underneath your fingernails to infest your ants, your grubs, your skin. I, assassin, wound-maker without knife, without teeth, slippery body corpse-silent, I, unremarkable ambush predator, am part of a family business. We …
Read More BENEFICIAL NEMATODES FOR TILLED SOIL AND GARDENING
Marriage
You used to be a whale and then you ate a whale and now you’re a cannibal. I used to be an avid pogo-stick-er and dream that my bones were liquid cheese, a real nice fondue. I’m always breaking into the maintenance closet thinking it’s a stairwell. I’m always making eye contact with the mop …
Conversation Overheard at the Upscale Market
–I just don’t agree with the whole premise really. –Premise, Sue? –That a product, any product, no matter how rare, unique or expensive, no matter how lovingly-made by local organic elves paid a living wage in handmade gold pieces bearing the inscription In, umm (stalling) In Good Goods We Trust! –I get your drift, Sue. …
Bedtime
Not just a regular routine but saying goodbye over and over and over. You enter the dark room to go on vacation— sometimes it is days until morning. We lie with eyes closed, Au Revoir, and we’re running and running and running, miles at a time. Running impossibly away from life, only to return again …
WITH FLYING COLORS, WITH BEAT OF DRUM
in the mirror slighted, in its glistening little cracks, dare not tempt God’s providence by fire (as here in a photograph, as not funded meanings, as a veil just half withdrawn), dare not forge globe of burning sky distinctly out of literal (mounting not toward morning sky) turning inside, dare not in the here to …
The Flood of ’94
The fire ants were the first to know. Grain by grain they stacked their hills five feet high. Deep reds and brown towering over my head. But no one seemed to notice them. We packed our belongings, and moved them to high ground, of our few leftover things, only an old dusty sofa turned on …
Eustace
1. Eustace at Lunchtime According to Eustace’s lunchtime reading material, heroin is becoming quite popular, even though it often makes a person utterly uninterested in things that aren’t heroin and commonly leads to poverty and/or death for the person using heroin. The decision is made to never try heroin no matter what and Eustace …
Totino’s Triple Stuffed Pepperoni Pizza Rolls
i am evicted from bed again last night i dreamt of something meaningful probably maybe it was the unspoken truths of being that lurk in the shadows of our words or the silence that dwells in the pauses of our voices our vices why do we lie in bed trying to find reason behind stacked …
Habitual Motion
A woman stands in a bright yellow kitchen. She is present in the life that he built with her though he is no longer alive, there in their little house. She puts on a kettle and warms the coffee cake made for two yet she sits down as a party of one. Outside the kitchen …
Sea Music
The sea speaks its own language: one of woosh, swish against the rocks one of boom against the balustrades, and the soft fffrmpt of foam on the beach; luminous echoes following every wave; its voice is muffled by grains of sand as under grey skies it whispers in green, and in the nights sings a …
New World
First comes the weight, then the ringing, then the scatterplot of electric light strung out along the riverbank through the window. Your hand stays immobile on the bed because, who knows? It could have been some bandage pressed tight against the skull by a mindful nurse doing her job, as in stanch post-surgical bleeding with …
Hounds of War
(the child soldier speaks) What will you say that will sever the head from the neck, held in arms, peering into a future foretold, that if I run to the warlord—that I will—I must bleed and tear my skin to stand between the gun and Dad, explain to him the sight of blood redder …
Bug Poem
They swarm, head high when I’m standing, mid-air above sapling, golden, they hover like ashes the heat of a fire floats and deck in and out of sun beam and tree-shadow burns through the pines reflecting off the water, and I think this is what love looks like. A thousand floating bugs on the edge …
Peaked Saint
If your walls could talk I would beg them to stay silent like I have tried to be. If they could hear I would have asked for boiling pipes, so desperate to fight the pain alone, all I needed was water a degree hotter than my cheeks, steam to sooth my contracting tomb squatted as …
Innate Value
You are valuable, and I’m able to see your value from any angle. People have become blind with insanity because no one lives in sanity where you see the sanctity of a soul. We don’t see the depravity in our audacity to have a mentality that treats humanity as vanity. We don’t understand the innate …
Go Live It
Who are you when no one’s looking? Are you looking the way you look when you know people are looking? Or are you constantly looking to make sure no one’s really looking to see the true way you look? Because when I look around, I see a lack of intensity directed towards integrity. So, infidelity …
To Belong
Everybody longs to belong, and you’ll be longing too long for belonging if you’re logging bonding hours talking about belongings. When too many conversations are revolving around materials of matter, and not the materials that matter, there’s no evolving of the relationship. The lack of involving someone in your inner thoughts prevents the involvement of …
A Dirge Melody: Don’t Let the Humans Know We Contain Souls
If you want the pearl the oyster growled as a lioness you will have to pry me from this rock wrest my shell jaws open cut my living muscle self apart. Can you do that? They can. They do. They polish, bleach, buff, label the pearl grade C light luster, barely usable. No one asks …
Read More A Dirge Melody: Don’t Let the Humans Know We Contain Souls
Slasher Flicks
A genre of publicly-traded companies is Horror with much higher death counts. They “cut” and “slash” better than Kruger or Jason ever could ‘cause they kill by the thousands in dark-colored tailored suits at a long table in a room with views with views. Macy’s is “cutting” 10,000 jobs the New York Times tells its …
Eat Your Heart Out
“Okay, I will,” he blithely responded. “Yea, you do that,” she smiled. “Wait, what are you—” “Oh my God,” she whispered. Taking out a scalpel, he looks down at his chest; now looking at her, he slowly runs the scalpel, starting above the collar bone, right in the middle of his chest down to where …
This is Called New Year’s Resolutions
I’m going to kick 2017’s ass so hard- so hard the 7 will become a lightning bolt. And don’t act like you didn’t know, the 7 is the ass of 2017. I’m going to kick 2017’s stomach so hard- so hard the 1 will become a “less than” sign for a math equation. And don’t …
The Greatest
The greatest movie the greatest director the greatest writer the greatest boxer the greatest coach the greatest player the greatest actor the greatest president the greatest general the greatest war the greatest football team the greatest country the greatest this the greatest that the greatest superlative the greatest …
Woke up Choking at Zero Four Hundred [fresh out of elegies]
The unofficial version of the story: He was stumbling home on Valium and unlaced Chucks cutting through the old abandoned factory, tripped, fell into the pond where they used to flush their chemicals and dyes—floated, floated, sunk. Willie’s obituary might as well have been blank (we weren’t even 17) some junk about still searching for …
Read More Woke up Choking at Zero Four Hundred [fresh out of elegies]