Fatherhood seeds the reign of vulnerability: Steel-toe boots demand calloused but open palms, and the never-ending inning birthed a gritty bullpen. They’ve tweaked the mound but it’s always been like this. Fortunately, when clouds look like liger cubs, a maple tree can become a barrel, and is our son waiting to learn a launch angle … Continue reading Alliance
He and his wife treated us to baseball, Good seats on the first base line. We cheered home runs with them, Shared popcorn, joked, talked family. Time passed, and there were gaps. Until I saw them just now in the drug store, As his cool, spotted hand gripped mine With a “heyyyyy …” And we … Continue reading Years
Honey-flavored lozenges coating our throats, you split a mango in the tree shade by the lemonade stand, fleshing out the football shaped seed. Juices running down our chins, you begin a burial ceremony for all the mango seeds we have eaten since June — lumps of fresh dirt — little graves — as if all … Continue reading A Honey Summer Fruit Promise
It’s actually so easy. to lie if you’re doing most of it to yourself. I don’t like to practice. I think I’ll buy the one with pine tree resin. I think I’ll drink it in the skatepark. I would kiss you here. I would tell you about my astigmatism and how it makes the skyline … Continue reading Poem In Which I Experience One Emotion And Buy Craft Beer
Into the dark and wide Des Moines I pour you, ashes fogging shallows. A moccasin in the rushes close by, Dark glisten, still as stone. Birdsong blesses the air, Bridge a silent acolyte. You rode ponies not far from here, Tamed litters of kittens, Wept leaving at summer’s end. Now you bloom again to the … Continue reading Home
Unless you’re counting those few days in January — and also that time in June. I want to hold out my hand to everyone who needs it. I know some good people who spent so much time in the dark, they became scared of the light. Holy are the things we put inside ourselves, always … Continue reading 365 Days Sober
Thin trees rise from the thick texture of the saw palmettos' sharp green leaves. Now I’m writing American sentences just off Grayton Beach. Tree-wood morphed into the shape of a lizard on the soft pine needles. My mother was born in fifty-one; next year she’d be seventy-two. I sometimes wake without dreams, uncertain if I … Continue reading Six American Sentences
New fantasy alert: I could become the vice president of institutional giving, wouldn’t that be nice? A new kind of life, the face of generosity associated with an association’s deep charitable pockets, the closest one can get to being a real-life Santa Claus, without exploiting elves and mass surveillance. I can see the highlight of … Continue reading Starting To Be Mr. Nice Guy
Like someone starts with a swarm of arrogant notions clenched solid at a single point on the earth, near a river or a road: Maybe the consciousness stream from the shadow who smokes his job through another thin roll? Could be the coral vine screeding up the fissured side of a brick wall over the … Continue reading Plots for a Fresco On Planned Obsolescence
Today is a shoe. The lace loosens and has to be tightened again and again. It’s tempting to knot it. The sole worn against the daily routine erupts letting a toe stick out. You wonder if you can walk around with your tongue’s tip lolling between your lips. The headlines: storms will embrace homes at … Continue reading Today