I wonder if the problem lies with me or infinity. Each day is its own kind of monster. More and more advertising speaks directly to me. Hearing but not listening. Listening but not hearing. Hot breath in my ear while I try to pick the lock on these handcuffs with my teeth. I need to … Continue reading The World’s Most Powerful Microscope
IT MIGHT HAVE STARTED with our father gifting my sister and me Swiss Army knives for our birthdays. Or maybe it was the broccoli and cauliflower drowned in melted Cheese Whiz he forced us to eat. My twin sister, in our private language, shared her revenge fantasies for that particular parenting faux pas. I won’t … Continue reading Cryptophasia
Armored blimps circling while villains build home aquariums: Know that when everything is spider-cracked, when car washes and gas stations and banks oversaturate suburbia, no tablemaking demonstration can save me. I light a candle just to dip my finger in the wax. Envision my hesitationas an oil rig. Snowbroth.A lot of pennies scattered on a … Continue reading Simmer
The jellyfish take the 6:00 AM train down to the beach. Some of the jellyfish make it through the sliding doors, some of them fall off the platform onto the tracks. I am the only not jellyfish on the train. The jellyfishes’ electric thoughts paint the ceiling of the car, the windows lit with neon … Continue reading Untitled (Jellyfish Poem)
THE SCIENCE FICTION WRITER waited outside the hotel, a revolver hanging heavy in the inner pocket of his overcoat. He’d only fired it twice, but at close range he didn’t imagine he’d have any difficulties. His hand was steady as he brought a cigarette to his mouth and puffed; in any case, it was all … Continue reading Zero/One
First day of the World Series, autumn hanging on, each tree seeing who can keep from being a skeleton the longest: This is when my fear of dinosaurs hits the hardest. Imagining myself as oil. The giant veined maple on the way to my son’s school like the stego’s last blooming fern. Soon the Series … Continue reading Blasting The Asteroid
ALL THAT WINTER, they watched it. Someone had cleared a rectangle of snow from the frozen pond, or lake, whichever it was, that lay at the northernmost side of their neighborhood in Ypsilanti where the streets began to yield to farms, and at one end of the ice they placed a hockey net. But it … Continue reading The Difference Between a Lake and a Pond
I GUESS I OWE everything to the old moose head hanging over the front desk at the Beaver Lake Lodge in Wild Duck, Minnesota. It is a rather large obnoxious thing even for me and it usually needs dusting. The first time I visited the lodge I was just out of college likely trying to … Continue reading Why James Tate and I May Write Alike
Here are Hidden Peak Press' 2025 Pushcart Prize nominees.
I finally got a refrigerator that dispenses cold, cold ice and water purified by a filter. Some people have these all their lives and some people never have them. I always go for ice now and I go for the purified water. My wife says it tastes better but I don’t know. What I do … Continue reading A lower middle-class laborer explains the economics