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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.

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.”

fealty

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just before my break,/ he came on the line,/ old and slow with computers now/ but wanting a discount/ he'd been told he qualified for.

Fifteen

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“We could dooble date,” he said.

Imaginary Photo Album

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Let me swim into your eyes. Let me show you my world. My album. My Albania. My albumen.

Terry, the Diamond-Eyed Barber

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No matter how bad his hair turned out or how avocado shaped one of those miscreants could make his head look, he would remain silent.

Gentleman Freddy

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Roanne, just out of jail, went to cop. That is, she went to beg fat little Freddy the dopeman to front her once more. She'd have to fuck Freddy, of course, but, well, maybe he'd wait until after this time. Likely not…

Transport

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Ruth carries always a small bottle of nitroglycerin; and tissues, wads of tissues; two Tums (for calcium, she tells me)...

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

Seasonal Affective Disorder

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A man of action would take to his rake/ but Sloth would rather watch and wait/ for snow to erase each leaf on leaf.

Honey Gold

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your light is gonna last me through the week

Highway 17 South

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did I read that right?

Exhale

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

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 Road

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we were traveling on wasn't necessarily going to go careening over any hill as fast as it was smashing into the blunt end of another cloudless hole like a cartoon cat chasing a cartoon mouse. It was huge like a stone wall that had its own…

Steel and Spell

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Pen or sword? Pick one/choose your battles carefully/for the paths oppose

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

Revisionist History

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A break from bleak world history and events...

Shoot the Moon

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Neither of us thought of real winning. We set about brilliant losing, dark angel forms of luck and greed, the desire, the craving, the need to lose so strenuous that one wins; we tied at thirteen.

Eternal Return

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When I slip through the seams I return to the same place.

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.

Vesper

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. . . how a body calls in the dark. . .

Morning and Coffee

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A dirtied light falls through/ the grimed windowpanes.

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

Prologue (excerpt from a novel)

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The clip-clopping of footsteps now echoes from the opposite end of the alleyway, and as you turn to face the figure who appears behind you, the figure wearing a fierce Noh-drama mask, you determine that this time you will enlist its aid in decoding this r

Blue Baby

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they taught art

Another Way

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If there was another way to describe emptiness, I'd word the endlessness of the sky, of the ocean at low tide.

The Song of Jerome

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"My love is with eggs!"

Trash Burning, 1976

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This time the bag's bigger/than the boy and the door.