Reading Time: < 1 minute oh my darling they stoleyour flowers to give a bouquetto the starvingit was a puddle, you see,organned into that menunext the tomatoesnobody dared objecteven though the puddlehad not yet begunto know its name letalone speak itthis time they sangthe blessingso loud the flowers vibratedtheir petals offseasoning they called itlike springor tomorrow
MoreReading Time: 2 minutes Spring Love Poem Silent falling snow blows west to east. I’m wearing everything I own and smoking a joint down to my fingers in the driveway. Tubes full of paper and ash. Orange lichen cling to aspen. Usnea on spruce and pine. Friendly fir. The needles not like needles, blunt like feathers, that feeling that Read more
MoreReading Time: < 1 minute It was a large boulder the size of a small boulder,no it was a pebble, it was a mountain of itselfand in the road there became the sizeit needed to be, the large size but notthe largest, only the size of a smallboulder, in order to flummox the sheriffwho kept thinking he saw a large, Read more
MoreReading Time: < 1 minute here are the birds flying pastin a purple skyoh how they go, they goand here are the fish gatheringupon the shore silentlyshore after shoreand the smaller flying thingswhose names we never knowbright glints in hot breezeall gone now do I lament these too soon?is there a turn in the roadup ahead that I can’t yet Read more
MoreReading Time: 4 minutes I sat cringing at the clinking ice cubes and clanking plates. The sounds seemingly growing louder the longer I sat there. Jennifer sat in front of me at the table for four, but I was looking past her at the wait staff, watching as they scurried throughout the Cracker Barrel, banging together dirty dishes and Read more
MoreReading Time: 2 minutes “Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” – Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” “And four black feet deep with/ Summer’s rotting rooks/ like Thomas Head’s and my time’s/ Unlamented, springless, passed.” – Assia Guttman Wevill, “Winter-End, Hertfordshire” (quoted in Guardian Unlimited. Saturday April 10, 1999) When we first met Read more
MoreReading Time: < 1 minute I could cut off all my hair ragged, nogrow it long in snarls, never wash,go barefoot, become leather,tangle my fingers up with ripped claws in barbed wiremade of rope and snagged lace, oh, yesI have been angry All. My. Life.so angry I have a little stove in hereburning burning low, and Read more
MoreReading Time: < 1 minute S.O.S. Inside we each have two radios the small onejust below the liverthe other where ‘World’s oldest dog Maggie dies peacefully, sleeping in her basket‘ used to be tights lose their atoms to the friction of my thighsI buy new onessame/time OKOKOK the blood on your knees times a numberyour meat roughly equivalent to seventy-eight full chicken breaststhree Maggies Read more
MoreReading Time: 14 minutes Originally published in Word Riot (August 2015) If we had lived in a godless, socialist country like Finland we would have been fine, but here in the land of Family Values our marriage could not survive paying for preschool. We were not like the Patagonias, who toured the school with us in their matching down Read more
MoreReading Time: 10 minutes This is an excerpt from an in-progress, yet sort of stalled, novel that doesn’t really have a good title yet. I smelled like a coprophiliac, except a coprophiliac would have made more efforts at hygiene than I’d done. I had a week’s worth of grime and sweat on me, hadn’t tried to bathe except to Read more
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