THE MAN BEHIND the Venetian blinds never knew whether it was sunrise or sunset. He would wake up in his leatherette armchair, or on the ratty sofa he kept for naps. He would wake up next to his soft pack of cigarettes, his pint of bourbon. He was waiting. He had been told a leggy … Continue reading Private Eye
Lincoln published poems in the Springfield paper dripping with daggers and cries in the dark Styron filled pages with treacherous weather howling tempests and horrific gray drizzle for me — it’s a dime-store black plastic mask I wore as a child on Halloween the kind with the two impractical nose holes and the … Continue reading Use Metaphors to Describe Your Depression
time slipped from our grasp and like a moony girl we clung harder to our holy texts filtering out life’s variegated strings, jaws of spit tautening in the crevices a mouth wishing only for a better pair of breasts. candles melted at windowsills the heart rolled in the earth’s slip — judgement, self-flagellation, pity — … Continue reading We Lived This Way For Years
my mother tells me about the symmetry of the roses on her own mother’s headstone how they hold within that ancient compressed animal her spirit — and in the end we are sitting on a bench in the garden I blunting the silence seeded between her and my childhood — the wind snapping the echinacea … Continue reading The Ending Is A Sharp Point To How I Was
In high school health class we measured our body fat percentages in front of our peers. I’ve passed out three times in my life. One of them was there. We were watching a Dr. Phil segment on anorexic teenagers in order to learn about the dangers of eating disorders. I misread emaciated as emancipated on … Continue reading Metaphysical Twitch
Set out to gather words like field flowers, vine ripe vocabulary hung low from crooked branches, and all too often, I’ve failed the harvest. Can’t compose from stocked shelves, would rather see those redwoods at the edge of flame, bright tulip fields bending in the wind, the apple branches laden with flowers, with bees, with … Continue reading On Writing
Clinging to a garden wall, I warn axes going up across the field to go dark, to burn far less. They have control of everything and really only answer to themselves. In a crazy manner, I crash into a crab harvest, shooting meteoric patterns of color over schoolroom windows. As the world loses doors with … Continue reading Sudden Illumination
I don’t have great expectations for the distant future. My woman keeps telling me that fifty years from now there won’t be an “us.” Just the usual engineering feats of tiny underground critters. So I’m making no plans for the 2060’s. Even if they come with their own summer of love. This afternoon is a … Continue reading Looking Ahead
On my day set aside for art, I painted the pearl crescent butterfly. I chose the male, not because I’m a misogynist, but its colors are brighter, more tailored to my palette. The one in my in-box was perfectly put together, with an alert head, eager antennae, and shapely wings, an inch wide. A coat … Continue reading A Gay Man In God’s Factory
Brother, we have grown apart. No more jumping on the beds. Then when your wife spoke of her troubles I saw your hands move, moths without flame, exactly as our father’s did while mother complained how it was too late to send the invitations. And his hands wrote out in the air an invitation. — … Continue reading Under Porch Light