In Conversation

Zygote In My Coffee (Her Breath) after Brian Fugett I suppose her breath was nice. I dreamt about her three times. She was watching tv all alone. She was sitting on a big pillow. The corner of the tv had what looked like a Post-it-note, and above her was a halo suspended over her head. …

First They Take Your Tortillas… “Make this make sense! Make this make sense!” Cracker McCracken is incensed about something. I can hear him bellyaching halfway across the factory floor. Five hours into the first shift following a two-week holiday shut down, and he’s already lost his goddam mind. He’s standing in front of his welder, …

The Wild Onion The dark wood bar was dimly lit The fireplace crackled with heat White Christmas lights peeked through garland draped around the room The long-haired musician wore a brace for carpel tunnel on his fret hand and would occasionally stop his rendition of Neil Young or The Beatles or Pink Floyd and shake …

The Engineer Halfway across the bridge we discover an avocado, dissected but unpitted. The event recalls a dinner at Claudio’s, where he tells us how the Tacoma Narrows was torn apart by harmony. We talk politics, the slow bullets of conversation fly, a dozen secret miracles. “I have not given up on the dream of …

all your hair there is my street addressing my sidewalk before nothing else of importance. and there is brick under the paving, loose stones and smiling holes that need to be filled. the sidewalk will darken in shame and hide when it rains. the street is a row of urinals flushing. and right now i …

A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst by Deborah Ketai Citizens for Decent Literature Press 2026, Winner of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize Deborah Ketai’s A Matter of Taste is a collection obsessed—in the most productive sense—with appetite: for food, for sex, for meaning, for language, for life itself. Hunger is not merely …

I Forgot The Name Of The Place I’m Going To The menacing clouds covered up the Big Dipper The roads have started to look similar And stitched together by the yellow lines And leading, so they say, all to one place. I drove twice, all night and day, caffeinated For a love that I crave …

Like a Virgin Was it Groucho Marx who said he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin? I was way too young to see her in her 1954 appearance on What’s My Line? Our family didn’t even own a TV then, but having just turned two a couple of weeks earlier, I’d never have …

What the Hell Did I Just Live Though? 2025, A Year I’m Not Comfortable Reviewing With 2025 a corpse shot in the head and dumped in a ditch, and 2026 racing out of the gate like a retarded child piloting a missile-laden Chinook, it is tempting to piss this column away just reviewing bullshit that …

Dinner Will Be Ready Soon Thomas climbed out of his car and headed for the front door of his house. It had been a long day at work. “Hey, honey,” he said to his wife. No response. She must be busy. He went into the kitchen and found her preparing dinner in the dark. In …