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)
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
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
And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him . . . And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. 2 Kings 2:23-24 I … Continue reading Going to Bethel
Meg yells ‘whoa’ on the Ferris wheel but the spinning doesn’t stop. Harold chews one regret after another on a bed made for two. Jackie keeps walking the dog the opposite way it wants. Joe continues to converse with an enemy he imagines. Marge says her husband is a hell-of-a-man and hates him for it. … Continue reading People I Know, But Pretend Not To
ascetics want to do nothing but peel in places where angels attach to an obsessive love but don’t eat their crust - they were first manufactured in the middle ages and, in today’s world, correspond to a warped mirror or an otolith scraped off the dung or a fracas of fern-like creatures or glow-worms made … Continue reading Ascetics
a clean wind through broken windows shadows of clouds across the hills, the freeways, the bright green back yards saw you standing at the desert’s edge heard the weight of truth in your silence said we are fucked but so are our enemies and it wasn’t the drugs that made me smile it was the … Continue reading Crystal
I circled the sun with a lasso of figures in the dark, where every atom’s splitting. My fingers tingled, slowly growing numb. To make nothing, draw a circle around what isn’t there. Bless the hands in the mirror, whoever they belong to. Eat clouds when in the motherless air. Is a short time circular, fluttering … Continue reading Death Is A Tower (Cento)
The stars peck our eyes as the night’s chemical grin rises. The wind plants a good-luck kiss on your cheek. We climb down the ladder, my hands behind your knees as we clear the last rungs. We have always touched as strangers; now our hands slide around each other lizard-like in a dark kitchenette. A … Continue reading Baby’s On Fire