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Hometown News: Newsprint Jesus (part 2)

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If Don’s story was one of faith carrying someone through his trials, the story of Randy Slafter is another. It was faith that brought him and his family to Johnstown 15 years ago. The wings of faith protected him from the dark angels of grief and tragedy

mondays get all the heat

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when i was five or six/ we lived in an apartment/ and every sunday/ i'd lie on the carpet/ to watch squares of sunshine/ crawl across the rug/ while my mother inflicted upon us/ a centuries-long hour of television/ worse than any droning mass.

Escaped Poems

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Sometimes my poems escape. They crawl out through my Wi-Fi connection, I suspect.

We Wore Our Hair Long

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You don't have to push back so hard. We wore our hair long. We wanted the animals to trust us in their wild open spaces. Everything will come undone. We wore our hair long because we wanted to Be able to find our way home in the dark…

The Court of the Vassal

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“I believe this is a case that is very much worth our time. Its probably the most important case thus far in your reign,” Henry said, “my lord.”

Frothing At the Fountain

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When I came back from California the second time, in the summer of 1965, I was the first around our town to wear my hair long, influenced by the Beatles. And I bought a bunch of blue caps that everyone in our gang wore, with the number “69” sown on

Imminent Weather, Five AM

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The spectacle of weather/ on the prairies approaches.

Looking for Comments

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So do you read my writing?I text youI need to know whatyou like betterThe bloodor the gutsThat's what it is.You see Iput it out therefor you.That's not what it saysbut I know the truth.Am I smart enoughgood enoughdo you think it's crapbecause anyone can like it…

Secrets of Philadelphia

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Bruce Springsteen begins singing from the loud speaker he was bruised and battered and couldn’t tell what he felt.

Exhale

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It's as if the house knew I was relinquishing my hold on it.

Troy

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It’s layer VII we adore/ and mourn

The Autobiography of the Falsehoods Which Are Not Love

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he wound up hating the woman he betrayed in his heart for betraying him in her body

Elephant with a little Poet on its Head

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“Every word was once an animal.”--Emerson This circle has been Broken. The mother has Disappeared inside the wounds Of gunfire like an Eye drop. Who knows if Any of them left, crunched Down, whole into the…

Friends

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I reach out and grab a can of soup with each hand and spin them around to dive into this much-heralded sodium situation. It's a landslide. I almost smile as I put low sodium back and continue to hold tightly onto regular.

Decision Mountain

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For decades the land the village sat on had switched its allegiance between two countries.

Inheritance

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My father died. I took his clothes.

Meteorology

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Among the raindrops/ occasional plopping snowflakes.

Inversions of Pound: Canto I

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these tender girls tears recent / with stained souls, brides of dead, / cadaverous Erebus; unguarded ladder / long the down going…came Anticlea then

Fifteen

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“We could dooble date,” he said.

An Open Letter To Lance Armstrong

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When I get my legs pumping, I’ll pop a spoke if I'm not careful. Massive fucking energy! And all that fat I was talking about? I don’t even really have that much of it, any of it really. My body fat is like one percent, which the doctors tell me isn’t

Skin Wins

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One day, my feet and hands got into an argument. My feet argued that they were superior because they were not only the foundation of my body, but the cause of its mobility. They were modest in size, yet supported and transported an entire body that towered over them.…

Highway 17 South

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did I read that right?

Any Given Recent Day

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Ten-year-old Bobby Akins learned that a shotgun shell struck on its brass end with a hammer can indeed take out the left eye of an eight-year-old brother observing the proceedings close by.

The Cherry

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He then spent his walk home to his single apartment spitting up various textures of red, combinations of cherry and blood mostly.

All Men With Well Trimmed Beards

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Or, do my own red flags counter balance his. My back and forth, my restlessness, my one foot out the door, my ‘once a leaver… always a leaver’, my pitter patter for a former flame... peppered with my transgressions, my mistakes. Or, worse, the way I have

Not Good Enough

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So where does that leave me, Roscoe Loomis wondered, dismounting his silver, aluminum steed in his sweat-soaked, spandex outfit, and, clearing the saliva from his beard he walked over, checked and smiled, learning that the bike track's timing unit showed it was Roscoe's…

The Eyes of the Inmate

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The courts had scheduled the date long ago but the time, an hour always left to the warden, had yet to be decided.

Divers

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and, once in a rare while,/ actual pearls.

A taste of competition

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We called him Mickey Habanero, because he could fill his mouth with the hottest food imaginable, the kind packed with the sort of heat that would melt the gums from the teeth of a novice, all without taking a drink of milk or anything else that would otherwise soothe the…

Sad without Tears

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Sometimes, to be sad, you don't need tears.