Category: articles
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You Are Not An Idolatrous Creature of the Earth
You Are Not an Idolatrous Creature of the Earth Imperatives Name definitively the body parts of a tree. A possibility becomes possible In becoming distinct. It’s hard to say: Today the sky is the shape of corpse. The collapsible shape of corpse, the perverse absence of the storm coming, feel Your body like a rock…
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The Way the Birds Call
It was the early morning after a big snow and the sun had just come out from the clouds. Even still, the ground had kept its heat from earlier, hot spring days. Instead of sticking and freezing, it had turned the road into deep mud. Just another day of that familiar thick clay Ed was…
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Two Pear Trees
Soon I’ll forget my grandfather’s garden and the way the two pear trees stand. I’ll forget afternoon visits, stuffing his freezer with zip-locked meats. Below us, garlic hangs in a cellar above canned sauce, the caps dated in Sharpie. Soon I’ll forget the way he shows me the first ripe pear, nodding — proud, as…
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Accent Piece
Hydrangea in a beer bottle, How did you end up there? Who decided to pluck your beauty, And wrap it up In a Pabst blue ribbon? Yet look at you. With your ivory coif And those jade shoulders. Who gave you the right, To look like home?
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The Turtle
Too often I find myself Roaming the aisles Of my local pet store. I watch the turtles In their ten-gallon universe, Swimming and basking. But today, The yellow shells and red eyes Spoke to me. “Why do you come to see us?” The turtles asked. “We know you won’t take us home. You just take…
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Tiger Caves and Temple Monkeys
Previously published in The Best Asian Short Stories (2021), Kitaab, Singapore. The hills are dipped in pastel shades of gold and indigo. The wind surrounds me in playful whistles, beating my clothes in sudden outbursts and drying off the sweat on my neck. Joint-aches had troubled me a bit when I climbed up this rock,…
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never sit with your back to a bookcase
i want to say something good like blood into a basin of stars but i’ve stopped listening to myself at least i think i have i am rolling metaphors over & over & something like a simile across the desk i tie imagery into individual burlap sacks about to them drop into a well when…
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Neruda at a frat party
you ask where the restroom is & i start to weep steam coming from my shadow as you walk away has light always stumbled pursed & curled like a pork rind when you walk into a room? will my teeth crumble like peppercorns if our eyes scissor or i try to speak? i forgive you–you…
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the peak of my literary career
as a boy i collected similes or things like them sorted roadside trash by first consonant put couplets of poetry on my bike spokes like playing cards no one understood or knew where i was going but i was on the local news once on my bike jumping 15 trash cans for national poetry month
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All Ireland.
sky turning dark with sports all gone over; the football and hurling put away for a year, a final show of the end of summer and decline to slow october. all of us decked for the matches, singing the songs and very drunk, all blue like tiny flowers celebrating oncoming frost.
