This room has four walls, but it is also without walls, expanding past the fragile steel of my skull. A fragment of me looks at rows and rows of glass bottles that harbor remnants of some yesterday. I am there, fingers tracing along bumpy corks and smooth, cool glass. Memories pulse beneath like a plasma bowl, striking out in purples, blues.
Writing
Poem #29
The doughnut shop isn’t up to code; / danger makes a delicious dish. / Here, hello is flash-fried catfish.
Poem #28
My grandfather's jaw is locked / into the smoothness of my chin / a mechanism that helps me chew / the fat at Christmas
Poem #27
Pen clicks mark time / in a unit where no gets / to leave.
Poem #26
As so many of you may well know, there is a lot to be said about Yelp reviews. The best thing to say about them, of course, is how useless they are; however, from time to time, they are poetic. I took a recent post and snipped it apart and sewed it back together. Please, enjoy this poem, unlike someone's sandwich.
A How-To on How-Not-To Eat a Crawfish
Until I was about eight, I thought my grandpa was a Spaniard. This may have had something to do with him looking a lot like Antonio Banderas in Zorro, but probably had more to do with the fact that I couldn’t understand a single fucking word he said. And like most kids who grow up in Florida, the only other language you are even a little bit aware of was Spanish. Meaning: that when he talked and I couldn’t understand him, I thought he was speaking Spanish.
Tending the Flame
We aren’t ready. When Sebastian holds the door, and the sky blinks into blackness, we aren’t ready. When everyone is left standing in the neon glare of street lamps, we aren’t ready. And when those lights inevitably wink out, too? Well, we aren’t ready for that either.
Poem #25
I've been working on some really big projects these last few months, which means less time for writing smaller pieces like short stories and poems. I've begun to rummage around the treasure trove of old poems, and I'm not horrified. There's a lot of feeling here, but at least it's true. Please, enjoy this piece and be on the look out for some really big news here soon.
Accountability Abstraction
Writing in the middle of a pandemic is hard. Everything is hard. But I assure you that I am working, or at least trying to work. This is by no means a complete piece, or even good, but it is work. And it is me.
Poem #23
restless road rage knots you in asphalt ribbons / tied to sunset suicides--glass shards bleed out / into the next life full of broken blue birds; / trauma begets trauma, inescapable.
