Category: articles
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Rhyme and Reason
As an insecure millennial New Yorker, I once attended a rooftop party and wore (if memory serves) a dress shaped like a giant handkerchief and a scrubby sweater the color of burlap. It was a cold evening. There was a fire pit. I was talking with an acquaintance who, upon learning I wrote and studied…
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Prufrock’s Peach
Recently I read a book in which a pastor asks her congregants their #1 most frequent thoughts about themselves. People wrote these thoughts on sticky notes and posted them to a giant board inside the church. Thoughts like, “I am not enough,” and “I won’t be okay until I lose weight.” If we’re honest, as…
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Creative Writing Jobs wiki (a.k.a. — wiki academic job )
Creative writing jobs wiki page for Academic Positions in Creative Writing that begin in 2021. See also: English Literature Positions 2020-2021 See also: Starbucks Job Board See also: How to Start Your Own Tutoring Business from a Single Craigslist Ad See also: Podcast: How to Start Your Own Editing Business from a Single Craigslist Ad,…
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Flyer Poem #150: Verbal First Draft
Should have said it anyway. Should have traveled the road not yet taken. Should have gone to the spirit of the stairway. Should have had the decency to listen. Now, the pale ice caps have liquefied to the bottom of the river of grandeur. The heat wave has frozen over as a new age hell.…
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Our Work Here Is Done
Not long ago, I went shoe shopping with our daughter Katherine. It was a spontaneous outing, which is unusual for me because I am no longer a spontaneous man. I don’t shuffle my playlist, I don’t keep golf clubs in my trunk, and I don’t cross roads without a walk signal. I plan for…
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Flyer Poem #79
The suburban oculus, keeping the metropolis to itself. The outdoor cathedral’s eye sees you all. Gargoyles, stone-faced about life, stare off into the brink of the city. They have no discussion value, so why would speech be necessary? Awkward silence at its finest, but the stones break it each time.
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Giorgi
I do not extinguish the candle of the moment. The moment is not blue at all. Opinion and reconciliation my thesis is light blue. Come to me with frost from behind, the star closed her eyes from the steam, the most important of the trembling guards, my century or a half. In pain and doubt,…
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The Year of the Locust
Often folks ask why folks call Southern Illinois “Little Egypt” and you have to tell them it all started with the year of the locust. It’s not entirely true, of course, but locusts carry forth the sort of poetic resonance the rest of the story holds. In 1799, this old Baptist minister named — you’ll never…
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Truly Julie
One night in late January, I was sitting on the shaggy carpet in my room, leaned against the white paneled wall. I held my journal in my lap and was waiting for a reason to write in it. My two pet rats were peering out from their steel cage in the corner, hanging…
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Flyer Poem #128: North
I felt your sarcasm in Cook County. Into this world, I land on the ceiling. Born in the heights of Arlington and raised in the culture of Wheeling. Discovered and connected, forever part of this Midwest city. Chicago, baby: my drug, my love affair. Redesigned and resurrected, a whole new man with none of the…
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Flyer Poem #74
Spirit lady, you are now a mental maybe. Hard to shake off the tribal dance of heartbreak. A hall face, a yearbook picture, forever wandering into the ether that we all fear the most. She is the unknown, but we are unknowing of her next critical move.
