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Facing Mecca

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I was raised in a big city in the slow South. I know a little about cross cultural dining and where Delta Blues collides with Sly Stone, Al Green, and Zeppelin. Dirty rice in the Dirty South. Fried chicken, collards, and pintos. Fried velveeta…

Samantha’s Note to Her Husband

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By February, I had decided, That you'd tear out my throat every morning if it meant your favorite song would play from my neck.

My Name is William Hurt and I Am a Movie Star

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Not to sound too ridiculous, but Hurt was giving me the hurt, and it felt good.

Silver Spring to Phoenix

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Vibrations of a cavern a mile beneath silver willows.At two in the morning beyond the Sheratona lumination of pollution intercedes realism.Cardinals and doves develop their melodyprogressively caught in beat/heart echoes,as with spelunker canaries fluting noxious gasa small…

The Shadow People

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Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,

M Tractor

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If I saw a little old man out there, a fellow with a hunched up back, I shouldn't be afraid.

Valhalla After Dark

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In traffic I cry bloody murder, but my bloodlust subsides once I'm in Valhalla. Chip Whitehead wants to see me on the 22nd floor before I start my shift. Charlie and the other suits have been looking at me funny since I sent Chip a memo suggesting the recession…

Mountains

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A Girl and Her Trees

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The trees would answer with a creak and a crackle. Fall was near, a rotten apple.

Mississippi

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“I won't live here,” Beth said, waving her hand to indicate the small Southern town in which they were having dinner—the most delicious fried chicken either of them had ever tasted—in a restaurant located in an antebellum mansion. She looked…

A Little Load of Paint

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Cézanne sags during a moment of paint. There is an umbrella in the room whose surface collects his thoughts. Outside, in the rain, the grass and garden smell strongly of spring. Fruit litters the table. Light through the window writhes in conversation with shape and…

Assiduity Six

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"Every generation is a new generation, isn't it? What's so different about your generation?"

Ilex Cahokia and A Common Piece

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remembering Cahokia, a place we rent near the water's edge, for we dare not enter

Kickstand

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Past the pavilion, past the factory, past the underside of the bridge where the surfers jimmy their sloppy fingers over the oil barrels.

Owl, Glass, Deer

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He calls it an owl glass: he’s allowed: he’s six.

Everything You've Got

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I reach into my pocket for my keys and discover the cough drops Iput there a week ago have melted. Now my fingers are sticky. And I don’t have my keys.

Crazy Eyes

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The kid with a testosterone chip Instead of a brain

Kidz Love Klezmer

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The clarinet and the accordion are brothers, I see. Big, fat men with curly, klezmer hair.

5 Narratives From The Field Museum (Naturally)

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5 Narratives From The Field Museum (Naturally) 1. The American wife asked her French husband why it took him 50 words to ask which pass they would need. He said, “Because it does,” and they argued more, each in their own words. 2. The child…

WARNING: I Brake for Plastic Shopping Bags

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"...innocent butterflies of pollution trapped and entangled,"

My Brain is a Pre-Historic Babe Magnet

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Ug seemed kinda down in the dumps so, uncharacteristically for a male hominid, I asked him why he looked so glum. “Ug no find nice girl,” he said, poking a stick in the dirt.

Love Lost

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She came to my house late that last night and shucked off her things and we slow-danced to Cruisin' as beaded rainwater slid off her black hair to the floor. She smiled an almost quizzical smile as she drank me there with her eyes, as if I was some…

Larry's "Gonna Die" Parrtayye

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When we started plans for the party, none of us wanted Larry to die, most of all Larry himself. Actually, when we first started plans for the party, Larry wasn’t dying.

Under The Tree

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There were echoes all around them, their shadows delirious and only existed in short spurts under the breath of the streetlights. They danced as their cigarettes leaked calligraphy across the night sky and she tried to trace it with her finger. He asked her what it said…

Political Poem

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As if to ask if I'm okay, as if to ask aren't we the same two on this wet December morning as ever, as yesterday, a month ago even, she shoots me a look as I stand by the bed, then her sane mild brown eyes…

Queen

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Normally, Aidan looked like a guy. A highly feminine guy, but still a guy. He wore his hair in a buzz cut (a turn on of mine), wore tight clothes, worked out so he had a bit of muscle, but nothing over the top. And he was my guy.

Seasonal Poem

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One of the poems in my collection, One Day Tells its Tale to Another, published December 16, 2012. Available on Amazon. My first book!

Illustrated Comments on the Apophatapataphysical Metrics of Cosmic Humor

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(the vast preponderance of dark matter and dark energy discernible in these latter days begins to suggest just how dark the humor of existence is) . . .

I’m Afraid You May Have Made Some

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awfully evil decisions upstairs in your head that could come back to haunt you in your later years;I'm here to report your zooming about hair isn't really one of them. You have found the infernal wheel works in all four directions at once. Good for you.…

Geode

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There is a rock somewhere with the truth of the sky in it, the glitter of otherworldly charms that falsify the ugliness of the literal.