LATEST ARTICLES

I wished to be forever happy. It was granted. Now I don’t know what it means anymore.
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Shelley

Pencil, graphic ink pen, ink and brush on Daler-Rowney smooth Cartridge drawing paper - 52cm x 37cm
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Sunflower

When I was nineteen, lost, alone, depraved and often raving from the lack of food and meaning, walking the streets for days on end after dropping out of college the better to sink, an old man stepped up to me and said, “Don't look so down. Hold...
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close up photo of tabby cat

The Cat

Klint rubs his knife clean against his dingy shirt. He thinks I never notice blood, metallic taste that lingers from a kiss, or his hands wiped clean across my chin. I get caught on a phrase, where’s the cat…the cat..where...
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Challenged

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green statue of liberty during daytime

The New Place

You were dead, I'm certain. I knew from the way we all looked away from your bed and into our phones. You sat up and grabbed both my arms. I have to tell you this so it does not evolve from dream to premonition, you said, "I...
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black and brown vintage camera

Haphazardly

It was always in cluttered antique shops that my wife and I could get our fill of nostalgia: where a 100-year-old typewriter may sit atop a 1950s television set; or the odd, single oar with a crack down its middle would stand lonely in a...
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silver and white round analog clock

Sass

I admire the fit of the monkey into the alarm & the women who drive their obscene sofa trucks from mailbox to church ... well, this is notebook land, deadpan ghost railways no one travels here without a blade somewhere on her...
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Goosebumps

We had goose bumps on our chocolate skin because we weren't well dressed for the weather We didn't think about clothes when we fled motherland on aluminum wings We had sunlight and rain and crazy kings who turned our lands to killing fields We wanted...
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I sit on the balcony like a droopy shirt and hope that I get assassinated the green SUVS and white mini vans pass by with no understanding of my ashtray stomach and neutered heart my couch is dead and I have stolen my wife's iced tea I guess...
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and said "Maximalist" as if it explained everything. I gave her muffins with cranberries, pine nuts, rooibos tea and dark chocolate. I warned her to duck so she wouldn't hit her head on the hanging colored glass, shooed the dogs off the couch and lit a fire....
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grayscale photography of man standing front of mirror

Reflections

I’m not crazy anymore trying to see myself like you see me. My reflection bouncing off the mirror is no longer the me who used to bounce off of reality. Still, I think you must be meshuga for wanting to be seen with me.
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...the long wave swells and rolls towards my shore sound is sucked from air till only the subterranean roar of a distant heart is felt and breath is held prisoner a gull breaks and wheels overhead the wave rushes i breathe salt and fire tremble like stars...
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Graves in the Sky

I know where all the graves lie; those of my father, mother, close friends, acquaintances, some uncles, some aunts. My parents' I visit often, the relatives' as often as time permits, but those of the other aunts, uncles, first and distant cousins, whose futures and their seedling...
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selective focus photography of tape measure

relativity theory

if you were only as thin as one atom one wide one tall one deep you can bet your atomic arse electrons would still think you're fat​
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the house grows smaller with each step I take walls pinching in a carnival room your chair in its corner worn like a molar a trick you still do blowing smoke from your ears refusing to acknowledge how old we have gotten the moles on my back growing swamp lilies the...
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Saved By The Spell

A flock of Dunlins startle rushing to rise on a Merlin rumor. Murmuring among themselves when to shrink or swell to foil an intrusion. Summer speckled plumage strobing like northern lights on wings. Conjuring a mesmerizing spell until it’s safe to feed again.
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Your Turn

I let the date whisper through me like slow bullets each year I refuse to count will not say it’s been howevermany years now for time does not touch this one I think it’s your turn now I can’t keep it up trying to be...
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HEYYYYYYYYYYY STUPID HEYYYYYYYYYYY STUPID the windshield wipers chant as I battle the midnight rain for a pack of Lucky Strikes.
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"Everything's a metaphor," he said, deadheading the rosebush, thick gloves protecting him from its spite. "Is it?" I asked, "Even us? Are we just a metaphor?" And though he didn't look at me, I saw a smile tilt the corner of his lips as he nodded. "Oh...
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school of fish in fishbowl

Joelle

They had deep dark secret day at school one time only. I don’t think they were prepared for the results that decimated the entire town, so many kids went into a makeshift foster care system that very night. It was impossible...
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Winding towards Josselin through woods green as absinthe, sharp as a lime slice, I drop the roof and speed carries the smatter of rain over the car and away. Along the ditches pollarded willows are crazy for spring. Wild cherries too. Lordly over small holes of navy shadow the tall poplars with their longer...
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the air from the vent suddenly shuts off and now my thoughts are so clear I actually have to deal with them
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blue and white ocean wave

rogue

like a 20-foot rogue wave wall appearing suddenly out of a placid, gray-teal ocean giving no time for fear to be digested, nor for comprehension to do its part, heaving us up into the unknown then dropping silently back down which then just as quickly moves on with...
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We are under a spell today the rules of gravity suspended birds float through the fog It is my eldest daughter’s birthday and this is an all-day poem a slow release I remember the drive to the hospital in a dawn so very like today I...
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towel on faucet near dish rack

Tanka for Zayda

my kitchen again -- the flash of sunlight on the counter was you and has me talking to the sky
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black and white digital heart beat monitor at 97 display

Losing Modality

Machines under alarm a squeeze from a warm hand. A whisper—please don’t die. I tried to reply but got confused in all the commotion never noticing the shocks from cold white paddle only my presence losing modality. I thought—this must be how a raindrop feels when it returns to the...
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brown cardboard box with white and red round medication pills

Antediluvian

In Midnight's hour I take my tongue and place it on the floor. (It loves to run about and play with Beetle, Dung, and Spore.) Then Teeth and I sit back and smile, enlivened by the show— And laugh aloud when Tongue cries out: “Oh, my!...
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When distant wishes calling you in breezes rushing off the bay, return, as blush of deja vu, of distant whisper calling you to kisses spent at twenty two which purchase now this windswept day: insistent whispers hushing you with breezes, shushing off the bay. This shallow bay....
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black wooden framed glass window

6:11 a.m.

I slept in a small room I dreamed there as a boy the moon came & went wind knocked on my windows sometimes in the grass in the fields between your house and mine a path began to appear now an old man writes this
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(Warning: Adult Content) I was just writing this poem where I was going on and on and on when really I just want to fuck it’s spring I’m frustrated and I’m not attracted to my wife I keep seeing these strangers that I am attracted to exotic erotic women jewels of the street that seem like they...
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aerial view of green trees near body of water during daytime

Detroit River

The annoying drone a mile over the hill, I-35 tinnitus. It helps to pretend it’s a waterfall or rapids or squalling river valley winds. At night its white noise puts me to sleep and I worry without it I’ll never dream again.
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I coaxed you into my life like a wild animal and loved you too hard. Like when the fox said to the Little Prince, To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me,...
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He conforms his tired bones to the shape of a bed, crosses his arms, lets eyes go to grey- spinning the world a needle grabs dust on a vinyl LP, no lyrics, no melody, but static white noise of an eternal note- like a line beyond home is his passage through dogwoods, forgotten memories that exist...
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Lost at Sea Alzheimer’s Pantoum I first noticed when we sailed as we often did from Robinhood Cove to Bath. A thick fog swaddled the boat, mist of the lost clung to our clothes, a distant one note lullaby, the foghorn sung from...
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The distance between us is a giant red star. The irregular shapes of particulate matter- drifting away. Your eyes looking elsewhere.
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he's out there now row 2 forcing tines into the rain-packed crust beating greedy roots against the fork shaking loose clumps of soil and stone salting the earth with his sweat writing poetry in his head cursing his balance reciting his bodily mantra of press push flex lift turn repeat as i sit here writing this watching...
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cardboard box lot

Bubble Wrap

Another packing up dream and we're getting good at this. The embroidered table runner goes beneath the bundled purple china cow. As we add linens to cushion around it, I can hear my step-dad saying, "this will ride in church" but then it's only you and...
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man in black and white checkered dress shirt wearing white cowboy hat

10-Gallon Hat

I got a 10-gallon hat But my head’s so fat I can only put it on 1 gallon at a time
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old ghosts

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The limbo of estrangement, the burden of a secret, the fragile hope of a ceasefire, the suddenness of endings, the wisdom in not speaking, spaces between music notes, the stealth of moonflowers, a final closing of eyes, the default beneath everything. And your relentless absence, the most obvious silence...
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then & now

at the beginning it was mostly words with which our minds spoke to one another, till some empty well of curiosity had filled; a wall of comfort had been built, word by word, but now, after all these years a mere glance, a quiet smile, a subtle frown, or even a...
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Wild child. Never mild child. Shut the fuck up child. Golden child. Scapegoat child—after while —go to therapy child. What do you know, child? After a while you don’t smile. You hiding somethin’ child. Make me laugh, child. Why "doesn't you love me" child? Trump country child. Stay...
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Metallic

Gray sheets of steel rain, each drop a tap, a strum, a drum upon the metal roof. A pickup band, hard rock, a heavy metal sound all loud, distorted, hoping to be famous, to be found.
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on a motorized scooter no purpose in life mustard drips off his hotdog
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This is the second time that Charles Bukowski appeared in my little magazine Clock Radio of the mid to late 1980s. He and I had struck up a fairly regular correspondence by this time, probably fueled in part by my...
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I spoke for my sister on the occasion of her death. I reassured the kindly and the concerned that I would curate her memories. Yet, I did not find meaning or meditative thought in my sister’s death. I did not enter a state...
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Running through tall grasses glass jar in hand, cover off – I can still detect a faint scent of peanut butter wafting up. He traps one first, a firefly, lightning bug, mom calls it, his lid on tight, holes punched for air to get in, bouncing...
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a bird is sitting on a branch with a nest in it's mouth

apocalypse

the world is spinning into myth again and all I can do is watch as hummingbird nests hang askew and all the fuchsia gemstones buzz into being, one by one. I await the splash, the misstep, the comedy of balance and bad luck. Falls like common grief may...
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Goth Moon

Windsor & Newton Black Indian Ink, Manuscript black and white Dip Pen acrylic ink, Kuratake Black Sumi Ink on Strathmore Illustration Board for heavy wet media - 53cm x 30cm
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it’s 75 degrees the first real nice day since winter I’m staring at a patch of grass with a confused look on my face like I should be doing something outside a fly lands on the railing he looks like he doesn’t know what he’s doing either it’s spring it’s...
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I am a friend to: eggs and the meditative journey of achieving perfect home fries-- rinse chop rinse heat olive oil on medium until it just begins to spit wisps of smoke add potatoes, coat in oil and Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning spread out evenly in the pan let...
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Coyotes

I said I had never seen one. They speak up there, above the cliff. We hunt them, said old Ted, spitting on the ground, Chase deer, eat hens maybe even you, he grinned. Told me his son had cancer and how he hated...
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When you get off the boat your perception changes You watch things more closely Like my beloved old tree dying I never imagined it would become dangerous There was no silent scream from it only the buzz of the chain saw that sounded like thank you The sky...
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assorted flavor donuts

Donuts

she told me that she had suffered from thyroid cancer explaining in some detail that because it was removed she no longer had any desire for sex I asked her if she still had a desire for love but by then it was getting late and all the questions I had left to...
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regular twelve-hour shift walk with a clock in Grimethorpe as security guard round N.U.M. remains, to find key, fit clock, walk ripped floor tiles, dust, unused coal mounds, collect evidence to record time, find key, account for my existence, set of other keys echoing...
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The case can be made that everything we do is done for distraction from the most righteous to the most evil even love is a distraction or the days of the week, birthdays, etc. without distraction, it would only be insanity insanity having her picture...
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Warm air rises to the ceiling. I draw a deep breath, stretch out my arms with fingers like feathers. My wife sees me lean to the wind, take flight like a balsa wood plane thrown by a child. I glide around the house, banking through doorways, pushing air past...
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but I never mailed it what’s the point the guy is dead would his carcass crack open a beer his rusty smith corona clack beneath skeleton hands while he searched for a book of matches to light a  cigarette no the whole exercise is silly besides anyone can write like Bukowski all...
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He asked me

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haiku

remains of snowmen now heaps of ice hard as bone
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No one asked you. My phone suddenly speaks in a mostly quiet room. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that” Everyone looks at me as I murmur Shut up Siri
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They go where nothing does not even moonlight Finding a way to slice the air and ride the wind If you see one bow down in wonder Touch it not Their ancient wisdom is delicate
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Start with a comfortable room, perhaps a warm kitchen, then add something odd, a clock running backwards, a drawer with a chicken bone wired as a pull. Mix in a likable character, but make them a victim, give them a flaw or an ailment, a...
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Blur

the window admits light into the dark room an empty couch against the wall a book open on the table you raise your hand over the coast where it is carved into pieces of what once was your shadow fingers attempting for sky your whole heart sitting...
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white text on black board

Mad Skills

Nothing new. Messy room. Mismatched. Teacher dull. Hair tangled. Lunch room balk. Cigar box full of broken chalk. Missed assignment. Deadline passed. Theme obscure. Outclassed. Scratched albums. No sleeves. Order wrong. Apologies. Paid fines. Unread. Librarian no friend.  Cracked spine. Folded sheet. Bill due last week. Two reminders. Come on! Account overdrawn. Out sick....
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that realm

there is a realm I'm often transported to when reading great poetry it's one in which the common becomes more refined and the simple, more profound where my words no longer narrate but are transformed into a spectrum of light and where complete, perfect poems will form as though...
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he asked me

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group of people wearing white and orange backpacks walking on gray concrete pavement during daytime

Elementary

Mom wanted me and Janie to start school at the same time, both be kindergarteners, to take the bus to and from, almost like twins. “That’d be better,” Mom said. “For Janie. To be together. Janie needs her.” Dad said no. That wasn’t right. Janie needed special ed and special teachers, maybe even a...
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Hardly a slither in the half-light yet still gleaming as if to restore our faith in shackle and shank, mast and boom No harm to look and linger at her pale sickle in the nautical twilight So full of kinship as she wrings her hands for yesterday’s...
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Had I seen the sweat pouring down the face or the abject fear in the eyes, or if I'd heard the screams of terror as my hand chased it through the air, I probably would not have swatted dead that poor, tiny fruit fly, and might...
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Last weekend I went to this wedding in San Luis Obisbo, and I didn't even get laid. It's a funny thing how at every wedding, from Spain to Timbucktu to Nome Alaska, it's always basically theatre in the round. There's...
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Guests

We call it the cabin this home of ours Tucked in between the lake and a snaking Half mile driveway we call a road Lined with wild berries early August Slushed with snow mid March It leads to the road A road leads to the...
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At age 14, I hauled alfalfa hay for a big bay mare, mucked her stall while a Philco radio back in the tack room blew a hurricane for us both. It was the year when sound was an ocean of drums, we would wade into...
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arriving early is being on time being on time is being late being late a disgrace and waiting in the clinic lobby for my name to be called is something to do
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brown and red bird on brown wooden bird house

head nod

i’ve lived long a desert denizen surrounded by saguaros in lower elevations than these northern hills where wheat grasses grow where pronghorn graze & briefly after i broke up the ice in the bird bath & returned indoors my heartbeat fast as a cactus wren’s wings as i watched a male cardinal from my kitchen...
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my house has been invaded by maintenance men it’s not their fault but I’m a prisoner here the bars of social anxiety keep me from any escape the house is infested by men in uniform the cat and I are trapped in the bedroom please send water and catnip the noise the...
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on your front lawn. i do not puddle. i am no slouch. i did not relish the enchantment of your touch when you gave me two lumps of coal to see your angelic face nor did i feel the tenderness when you draped this schmattah around...
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strut your anorexic poem down the page like a Gucci model down the runway both pretending they don't give a fuck
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At the edge of the sidewalk, looking like a black blotch against the snow with two small sticks for legs and a stubborn beak, a crow was fighting with what looked like a cardboard box. Curious, as I always am about...
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Tic-Toc

I have heard people say they think in shapes and some in colours and one time a guy told me he thinks in hurricanes and I mean he could hardly get a word out this guy for the storm...
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time lapse photography of body of water

Banishing Rain

In memory of N. "Rain" Dailey, Salem, Massachusetts, 1998 I light a photograph on fire, toss it to the outgoing winter tide; flames char her despicable face reducing it to ashes. After a kiss and a swallow, the beach is clean.
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pebbles in this stream once wild & sharp-tongued, now a shining example of obedience, conformity
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there are dark waves all I have to do is jump in them and I’ll disappear forever I won’t drown I won’t get washed out to sea just at the moment of submersion I’ll never come back I’ve been searching for this beach a very long time
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letting go of your hand I fell into the night sky high above the streetlight where you stood I did not beg you but I begged the world not to let me go & falling I walked away & I kept falling inside myself until finally I fell into...
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In the freezing winter of our dissolution, when his engine block cracked in the Ford Econoline van,      fracturing our sanity,   making our lawn a weeds cemetery, coyotes saved us with their Hallelujah! chorus. I heard divinity in their mournful howls, “Please! just a half-eaten hot dog bun, anything...
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February

This is the time that cannot decide, a penumbra of seasons where everything hovers between either and or, string lights and marigolds, and no one bothers to enunciate correctly. I am flustered, inarticulate, prone to dumb conceits; I don't know what I am, or where displaced love resides. I only know...
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All my bent metal

A trailblazer over brown hairs a thin cut from old razor legs smooth out by lotion by rain by running in the rain by the dull pounds of my feet by the treadmill by how easily I take bait by the way I miss the beach and my sister, and...
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Lately, each experience feels uncommon. Living in one room with a pot-bellied stove, a wooden crate for a bookcase, a rug of woven rags, my thoughts beat against the unknown; nothing is ordinary. It feels wrong to live and not respond. I paint a boisterous...
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to a heart attack, that greasy, salty hunk of heaven. Oh, lowly worker, be my savior. Bring me a box, a bag, a promise of fries, of fat. Hand me my happiness, my hope. I park close to your neon church, engine idling, bask in the tanning bed glow of your lights. Secret sauce,...
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write of parlay we chatted over manners and harbored edges. these things … moved the line into a place of rural contemplation.
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woman in black long sleeve shirt

mystique

blasée, the feminine rolls her hidden eye— he marvels at the width and breadth of the mystery; he is her ripened fruit, fallen into life; and she is the shine of the onyx; her sight is firmly fixed on horizons yet to appear; ever the answer, elusively...
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I would give you my fortune if I had one. Until then these rocks in my head are yours. For example, this one.
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3 bottles on black wooden shelf

HERMIT

I  haven’t left the house in weeks,   limping room to room, forgetting what I came for, wearing unwashed the goose-turd green flannel pajamas I inherited from my mother-in-law’s awful second husband.  On Netflix last night, a precociously ironic five-year-old protested, “Of course, I love popcorn! I’m not an animal!”  Then...
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red cardinal perching on black metal bar

Lost and found

today marks the 40th anniversary of her death I still haven't learned how to play the drums but the January birds are singing like spring is here and the coffee is good and I'm thinking of the person whose $30 I found in the...
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My sister Cape was only two years older than me except for the summer months we were one thin year apart. And there it is the first sentence which I write similar versions of, maybe identical, once in a while...
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i love my son i love each of my sons i have loved them for a long time i love each and all of my sons very much one day i might tell them this but its hard to put love into words and what...
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white wooden stand

undone

she is a blank canvas loitering on a Gothic style easel how many ghosts of painters needed to finish her shrouded pine trail?
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a white car parked on the side of the road

Bedtime

Dad let us stay up the nights Mom went out to sing with Sweet Adelines, saying we were big girls and could put ourselves to bed. “You don’t need me,” he said. “Apparently, your mother doesn’t either.” We got in our pajamas and brushed our teeth, coming downstairs to sit...
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Lacquer 40x40cm  
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I have Magoo eyes, narrow slits carved through bone that filter distractions and see to the future. When tapped with a toothbrush my broken teeth ring with glockenspiel notes, a harmonious mantra that ushers in peace. Air enters my lungs like candle wax dripping and forming...
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i don't think about him much he wasn't very good and i wasn't either but marked in red pen at the top of my first poem for class he wrote— "Watch your use of cliches." it hurt so freakin bad to read that i learned i shouldn't use them and now...
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Among the litany of lost relics, a Swiss music box tree stand that played O du fröhliche, silver and sent home after the war and a holy rustic doll house to teach us the beauty of scrappy origins, in splinters and old straw. Our Aunt would point...
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selective focus photography of red macaw parrot

Bird

                           When I am old                            I said as a child            ...
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I remember her porch her cat in there it was screened in it was summer late at night almost morning the darkness and the temperature just right I looked at her dad’s easy chair in the living room it was so quiet in there things were going so well for us in a...
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Into this temper of writers called poets I shove my own shoulders Respectful of the undertaking I chisel my words and aim with care between lines All this poetic lingering to keep my little sentence from dashing to the page naked
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There are birds here, the garden has no fence. My neighbor checks in on the roses and brushes away lice with soft working hands. I'm looking out from the frailbed through the window at him, and past to the mountains further, west. The strokes of dusk yet heavy of...
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full moon and gray clouds during nighttime

Owning It

The moon is above me my toes are cold so I put some shoes on not because I'm going anywhere but just because it's harder to keep warm these days and I realize just now that I love being old - most of the...
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Feels like I have a bag over my shoulder that’s full of yesterday. As I approach Alice’s place it gets not exactly heavy but cumbersome. Alice hasn’t lived here in years and the big house has seen better days....
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and gets hung on the curb then, freed by the wind lands in brown weeds beside the big ditch. I kick at a beer can. the houses seem smaller, the neighborhood tired, run down. brown faced apartments now grow instead of green crops, in the fields where we played. I walk back to my...
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large pine trees in a bark beetle free forest after living long lives of capturing carbon & releasing oxygen & having been a home to myriad wildlife dreamed of becoming the paper poets write poetry upon & poets being another form of wildlife dependent on...
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I stepped outside my flat I named the bunker and there was a woman bestial with insane eyes surrounded by the trash of her own making syringes toilet paper plastic bottles and a tomato "you really shouldn’t be here" I quietly intoned "I’m five months pregnant! You wouldn’t understand!" She was right about that Bristol, February 2022
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Glowing

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Flight

"Flight" an acrylic painting on linen.
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mountains with trees under white star at night

my

poems are not meant to impress you. they are written to help me make it thru the night.
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A walk on the beach

...on a very cold morning.
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Should I ..

Should I admit it all started as a pile of phrases and a symmetry fetish? Should I credit nighthawks and traffic in the liner notes? Should I care that all characters think they are protagonists? Should I arrive in stages, like grief or a movie franchise? Should I redraw the constellations because Orion...
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I am weeping. Please take my tears. It's all I have left. I lost myself. I don't want to find me either. I am dying in a shadow that I keep letting fall. Psalm 23. The sweet comfort of...
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Sometimes I just feel like telling a love story with a happy ending, and none of that conflict that people are told they need in stories. We had enough of it growing up, you see, and I don’t only mean...
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“Why don't you write about me!” she wailed from the bed as he sat before his desk, lost in reverie. Without looking up, he replied: “My dear, it is true, you are the million-dollar beast — deserving of a novel, at least! But she—my beggar, my gypsy, my thief—was priceless.”
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I'll be brief, for we are both busy and the calendar Gods have laid waste to that idyllic peace which, if we're honest, is as foreign to our forebears as to us. Yet there are moments in our backbreaking lives on this backbreaking Earth...
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I screech and I hoot and I dance on this morning for sunlight through the windows, clean, cold air and a woman. It seems she’s content to stare into my face, shower, go to work… sleeze in the junk of my existence. (Adding her junk, her...
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what I don’t know could fill volumes… the formula is V = s3 if all of the things I don’t know were stored inside a cube shaped terrarium larger than the Empire State Building & everything that I do know is a giant gorilla in...
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Near the Mexico border in the Chisos Mountains of West Texas they say it is so dark that you can see the entire Milky Way without trying I look to see how many miles the truck has how many miles it is to Big Bend calculate...
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in the kitchen of the blacksmith there are only wooden spoons his hand pauses to examine the sky silverware falters tumbles from the clouds and rains across the cindered floor beyond this room the world remains flat or not he questions physics alchemy the ability of butterflies to consume entire forests free...
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The Typewriter

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Grace

It is there when a hole in the road accommodates the water that carved it and later, the patch that fills it, when a mango and stone accept their mutual need, when a casket, like a womb in reverse, harbors bones or trembling lips and reddened eyes try so...
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brown sparrow perching on gray branch at daytime

Ghosts

How old was I? I can’t be sure. You know How Time can be; how it Gets stretched, compressed Torn and torched, but I know I was young Trying to fit in again Before I learned to stop; I was out with my brothers Taking pot shots at...
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I’d hoped the cruise on the Seine would be the highlight, but it wasn’t. Nor was the open top bus tour. We inched up the Eiffel Tower like climbers on Mont Blanc. It was February 2012, and Europe was in the grip of...
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In the Deep Blue

Lacquer on wooden board 23x25cm
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I remember talking to God the conversation left unfinished I got up and went to go about my madness but there was a moment there with Him where my breath was more than breathing
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so far we have read the rules in black and white in print meanwhile others translate them in different colors i read your poetry in the rain
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Went to church today. A sanctuary of a few sitting and spread out at the pews in front and behind me. A man at the left corner of the platform sits well clad in front of an organ with two large, slim hymn books opened as his...
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You are not the trees, nor the clouds reflected in a black plate pond. The diving knife breaks the disk pulls the jelly plant: You are not weak not alone. Everyone here is upside down.
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His Coat

His coat of several years— an acoustic blue and thyme puffer morphed into kangaroo pockets. It hordes crumpled store receipts (with barely visible ink), napkins taken from Dunkin Donuts and other things from wherever else he frequents. His life could be said to reside in the...
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It’s been raining since Christmas yet the water is lower than ever before and there’s a newly revealed rock looks like the hood of a car and all sorts of imaginary accidents play consecutively in my head before I...
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I will grow my remaining hair long, and wear slip-on shoes. I will clear a corner in my house, set up an easel, and paint badly. I will squeeze every avocado at the produce mart. I will freely offer opinions at dinner parties, but I will never...
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he let me sell my poetry books in his comic book shop one day I wandered in to see if any had sold they hadn't Dan, I have something for you, he said and slid a hundred dollar bill across the table to me saying, print up...
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I rearranged my books on the shelf today in alphabetical order. Didn't realize how much time had passed on arrangements alone. What about the impatience and shouts coming from scattered weeks turned to years? There's something energetic about the surface of leaves. Still searching for answers.   
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Doesn't wanna see the next day As long as his hair and beard Not shaved. Same old sweater. Same old fading jeans. Same Old scent. Same old bad luck At the ATM. It keeps on telling Him, but he refuses to believe The statement. Customer service Over...
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when i am dead will i search for a dead goose’s feather & dip the calamus into a dead fire’s ashes & into a dead beehive’s wax & write a dead poem on the skin of a dead calf or on the dried pulp of a dead tree &...
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he said he was looking for the light but i thought he said stay with me forever i remember windflowers & the way he crossed his arms behind his head the trickling scent of garden chores & how four days can be a desert when there’s...
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A small hermit crab walked on her hand, she gently cupped and closed. Hermit crab moved house that day, but still it was a familiar place.
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If hardened eye and calloused hand are able to perceive a rim of gold around a plate, a touch of lace upon a sleeve, and if the rough and scaly bark of some gray trunk can be at one with tender leaves of green to share...
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sunlight glinting off piss
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Enough

Sometimes I think I should stick to fiction. It’s probably easier to remember lies than is it to remember little beads of truth so liquidy they slip through your fingers, but like my stepmother said, ease is for suckers,...
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A man whose heart is a time bomb says leave the house, breathe some fresh air, meet people, take chances. When he was younger he advised all his friends to follow their instincts, have a big dream and expect to have failures. After spending my life watching others...
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these days these nights a hammer pounds against my head after each death in your sea my tongue is sour neck & back needs twisting no matter how early or late I close my eyes you pinned me down      yeah less of you      I'm no floating stone too much of you       still    I'm...
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They’re 85 walk daily he holding her hand. She stops frequently transfixed by far off. Fusses with her scarf until she’s done. Even now he watches still smitten.
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Solstice

The moon and I have time tonight to give the year a fair review, to talk about the times that we were bloodied, halved, in hiding, and the light we had to borrow since we can't emit our own. The river where I found her...
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stainless steel framed green chairs

I Ask You

If a person flies off a barstool into the open arms of the floor are they not paying the cost for taking a shortcut to love?
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People

Falling in love is like swallowing grains of sand to recover the pebble you skipped across the pond by your childhood home, the ripples setting in motion every marvel, every horror of your life; except the grain touches your tongue, you close your eyes,...
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log pile

slowly it diminishes withdrawing toward the wall and ground each one taken without thinking until before you know it all that is left are the bark scraps and a dark tarpaulin flapping about in the wind
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overlooking city buildings and trees

Penthouse

I had lunch yesterday in an apartment overlooking the neighborhood in which I grew up and now I know how God feels
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Myrna was standing in a long line waiting to checkout when a lady in her early 60’s dropped her cane & it turned out she had the same doctor who replaced her hip as Myrna’s friend, Lavern, the realtor that sold a house to the...
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of Cain’s Mayonnaise, circa 1975 Powder blue Porsche both delicate and racy for small town roads speed limit sign, 30 miles per hour certainly restricts this car. Cotton-soft light blue color obscures a fast-car image, streaks from rotary, revs the circle up to the gasoline pump, hi-test, of course. Meek attendant...
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We’d catch carp in the river put-em on a stringer walk home through the alleys of the boulevard homes throw them over the privacy fences into the backyard pools their bottom sucking mouths still gasping for their muddy water lives
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clear glass bottle with yellow liquid inside

Piña Colada

After thinking not too much or too long, I knew I needed to get a job. Mike said so, too, but mostly so he could buy pot and get his parents off his back after quitting school. “You can finally pay for some shit,” he said. I told him that wasn’t fair. He said...
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When I look back, I picture a multi-million pound Formula One pit crew, making snap decisions at break-neck speed, but instead of shaving seconds off, this team’s goal is to add precious time onto precious lives— underpaid NHS nurses and midwives rush around the motionless bodies of...
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Petrichor

There’s a storm already brewing, asphalt waiting for a shine, a string of lights all set to spill and bleed as watercolors only one of us will see. But I am wholly unprepared to be the oldest generation looking down at where I was, then up to...
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The past continues to Breathe in me. Occasionally it is kind, Tho often it finds me Breathless. I glance back and small details Come alive, with strange power to wound me Yet again. How can sunlight in my childhood living room Continue to light up dead goldfish Floating in...
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Click any image to view full-screen.      
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no title

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I don’t wanna talk to anyone I wanna have a conversation with a blackberry bush in summer I’d say, you sure look like you’re thriving and the bush would say, thank you, you too and I’d forget about the winter and hospitals and commuter madness I’d...
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self portrait #2

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yet again

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grayscale photo of bare trees near city buildings

Wonderful

this is a poem about my mother that is what this is about my wonderful mother and how I did not go see her for years because I was too busy looking for her in places like san francisco and houston she wasn’t there          SHE remained roots-deep...
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Side effect

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droplets on glass panel

Opening Line

Last night I dreamt of the perfect opening line to a poem that would, I had no doubt, piece back together the crumbling world. It was a line that drew you in, breathless, that made you drop everything—coffee, that online shopping cart one click...
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The SPOTLIGHT EFFECT is the psychological phenomenon by which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are. Being that one is constantly in the center of one's own world, an accurate evaluation of how...
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black typewriter on brown wooden table

since the reading

was for a group of aspiring writers, the host asked me to start off by giving the audience a writing challenge of sorts, something to think about while i was reading. i thought that was stupid and crazy and counter-productive. it was bad enough having to read my poems, which i hate doing, because... well... i just hate it, but that’s...
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closeup photo of green Converse high-top sneakers

i remember the last time

my mother combed my hair. i was standing in the kitchen with my friend Stephen (it was always Stephen, never Steve) and we were getting ready to go back out to play. i don’t remember how old i was, i just remember being sweaty and dirty and i’d washed my face and got...
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because god was lonely and everybody loves you when you're six feet underground some say paranoia is a heightened sense of perception but it's another type of madness to lose yourself on the ferry boat wondering who killed buddha it might have been jesus...
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Among the litany of lost relics, a Swiss music box tree stand that played O du fröhliche, silver and sent home after the war and a holy rustic doll house to teach us the beauty of scrappy origins, in splinters and old straw. Our aunt would point...
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there is a nice long beach and lovely views out to sea the sea that is rising
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Inmates

The rust-colored brick tenements testify to the city's history, shifting masses of tenants absorbed with daily drudgery, jobs, errands, rendezvous. Inside each apartment, walls of mementos, souvenirs, prizes down the long tube of lost memory. It's a precipitous fall into desolation, a short fall into mistakes and error. Those...
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Ours was the turnaround driveway, the one in which mistaken cars corrected themselves, and zoomed back up the street. My mother said, somebody’s here every time, her voice interested but laced with dread, the dish towel in her hands she shimmied...
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I’ve been so long writing what has turned into a novella, hate that fucking word, and like, fuck me dead, I just want to write something without fucking worrying about that fucking carnival. Jesus. What the fuck did I...
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Adrian

You have a warm smile You are twenty-six years old You are strawberry blonde like your siblings You have strong shoulders and a six-pack we envy You are captain of the football team You have presence, yet are modest and shy You make people laugh You...
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Avalon

There can be a lot of waiting, but that's ok, he noted as we leaned into the night and the sky became a window to a thousand seasons past. We named a handful of stars, and I forbid myself to wonder which ones were already gone, or if...
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Open Arts Press, LLC, has released a new, free broadside of poems by Leeza Simmons Sikes. Download your copy of Bitchy Poems now. Art by Jenn Zed.
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I had a big book of haikus that I lost to homelessness which is a haiku in itself but it hurts too much to write it I cried when Leonard Cohen died though I never knew him thankfully, I know Bob Dylan will never die I'll never get...
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saw some alien visitation jizz on unsolved TV    close encounters of the filthy kind   with all-you-can-eat UFO porn   vintage 8mm clips brazilian style pretty pink    pulsating orbs shaky cam zooms     focusing on double pen with ample space spurting green spunk all over its face ***
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After bathing in heavy cream, I turn down the covers of my Procrustean bed, “itching” (as the song goes) “like a man on a fuzzy tree” who’s “gonna need an ocean of calamine lotion.”  Today, an environmental justice blog posted, “you won’t get a clean reading from a tree...
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The last time I enter this room, pushing past the clothing and the furniture into the landscape of this room, where there is a bed, where there is a rug, a wall, a window, two doors, a floor, and a telephone, the last time I enter this...
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something is changing here, so slight it can hardly be noticed. yet it has been.  a feeling, came with the light rain. the quietness. all things are changing.
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Mobile photography, New York, Fall 2022.
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No yellow brick road. It’s fire brick, used for ovens. A walkway cul-de-sac not a scenic drive. Buttons of every size, shape, color & un-Aryan creed. Stored like ashes in giant glass urns. Menhirs sunk left and right to abhor inhumanity. Now, a tourist attraction.   https://www.peoriariverfrontmuseum.org/exhibits-collections/peoria-holocaust-memorial  
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Stuff tulips in your mouth Don't deny your heritage Dutch girl. If you have intelligence, sadness and an innocent face I stick to you. What I see: The emperor's girlfriend chewing poppy petals. My mom's then boyfriend told me that her death for sure had something...
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Oil paint on Ampersand Gessobord panel, 3mm uncradled - 54cm x 30cm
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find the chosen pathways watch the birds and wild flowers grow below the scene plays out with wildlife as punctuation
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There were a thousand stars reflected in a schist rock bowl of rain. One of them was mercy though you claimed you didn't know which. You stirred them up with a walking stick and blurred your own face, insisting you would recognize grace but that was...
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fear of this and that of nothing in particular that no one else  will understand
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While asleep on my back, fingers jitter, type a worrisome montage of scenes, beginning with a fall from a harp player’s sky to an ocean of sharks, a parachute, opening late, and a small wooden raft floating towards shore. Playing cards rain on the boardwalk, a street tough...
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  Spotlight effect
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growing up rough

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things i haven’t done since primary school eaten tapioca pudding with rose hip syrup asked a girl the color of her knickers won a competition for who could pee highest up the wall eaten orange plasticine felt the sting of a cane across my...
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Too Sexy

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The Book of Unknowing 1 What is this scrim between Music and the self? Who is incarcerated for The crime of lucidity? 2 How does one expunge The soul’s bile? What is this chill – like Floes in river-blood? Why is it I cannot Sing like the finches of dawn? 3 Why does...
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STAND

They will come if you conjure them into existence, if you sneer at them and tell them, directly, how stupid they are, if you insult them they will not just leave it at that. So be careful and pick your spots. They will come at...
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It takes a lifetime to press. And there's no atonement but for the very rebellion of being in the flesh, I've seen birds hang so heavy. You were here, it happened. Your curtain still ripples in the midday light.
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white 3 bladed ceiling fan

Alone

this silence is better soft sounds of the keyboard the gale winds and rain stop subtle whispering of the ceiling fan birds gone to roost and no trucks on the street
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Some Saturdays

Some Saturdays I’d get restless after working all week for salespeople who never invited me to happy hour. When the sun set, I’d load my backpack with beer and cigarettes, lace up my boots, and bundle up in a corduroy coat and black knit hat. I’d skirt down the alley to a dingy...
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the fifer piping long around the main street and also the kathunk of a truck crossing the coleman, today is the reckoning of sadness, our voices talk over the violence, this syllable and that phoneme, we are all masters...
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Still I Cry

I didn’t replace you, girl. I did clean the blood your body left after the cancer came on, a slow crawl. Then quick. Like you were bit by an invisible monster. It may never leave my memory like you, my first baby. Most unruly. I didn’t know what...
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dinner boys are unnecessary to window a past of shed snakeskins hushed of meat everyone leaves on last-laugh ships tricky grandfathers too when the wilderness returns & the time of education is over I'll be cut down, an old diseased tree, hazard to traffic, the stump left...
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white ceramic mug with coffee

Regret

“The only difference between a flower and a weed is judgement.” Wayne Dyer I have put pen to much that I ought not have written, including, perhaps, these very words. I have mistaken Ragweed for Goldenrod, alleyways for gardens, watched them torn out, make...
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The Self Portrait

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Wabbit with isographs

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.untitled.

is your head clear today, loose limbs, while mild air floats above. will you go the other way, as you did yesterday?
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persons left hand on black textile

Pain of the sex

One. The burden to carry other, to make it all right. I take my prejudice hard rather have it punched down the drain, things and events cream and licorice, feel this cheek collapse. Give me a fist and I'll eat it everybody starts with hurting their mother.
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In this life, we met

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