In Conversation

Stuffing: A Thanksgiving Play In One Act (True Story 2009) Players: Son: A loutish bearded hack in his early 30s. Mom: Early 50s. A million miles a minute. Setting: Mom and Son are perched on a power line like two strange black birds. They sit high above their Indiana neighborhood. The sound of a ringing …

What Kind Of A Bird Is This? I have this idea for a poem I hope it’s a poem it wants to be a poem it’s gonna try to be a poem but maybe it won’t be a poem maybe it’ll just be a hybrid with a handicap an aspirational prose— a bastard mixed breed …

Pella Felton Reviews Streetlamp Nautilus by Catharine Batsios Batsios, Catharine (2025). Streetlamp Nautilus (Poetry Collection) Luchador Press 98p. $13.00 (Paperback) By the time the I made my way through the first page of Streetlamp Nautilus, I’d witnessed an aneurysm at a local diner, a bullet hole in the glass, and a long line of Buicks. …

Holy Toledo (pt 3 of 3) My wife would like me to mention straight away that I got lost several times on the way to Culture Clash Records the morning of the Lit Fest. That is simply not true. I turned down the wrong streets several times. I wasn’t lost, I just jumped the gun, …

The Long Road to Self: Kathleen Florence’s Prayers With a Side of Cash In Prayers With a Side of Cash: Poems While Driving Across America (MoonTide Press, 2025), Kathleen Florence reinvents the road poem for a restless new century. The journey begins in New York and ends in Los Angeles, but the true destination is …

Echoes of Survival: The Music and Memory of Rich Ferguson’s Somewhere, a Playground Rich Ferguson’s Somewhere, a Playground (Moontide Press, 2025) announces itself with a street-level hum. From its opening pages, the collection pulses with the noise and nerve of lived experience — the friction between beauty and brutality that defines much of contemporary urban …

Being Human Is Easy Breezy Someone turns on the lights And the factory keeps buzzing Then foreclosure and Whatever was done is done. This thing can be done In a Jello-mold kind of way, The way of marshmallows Claustrophobic in lime green Aquaria and yearning For women whose bodies Mean something, Broad-hipped women with Heavy …

The Prayer Thermos All night rain, waking      to mop the prayer           from my sleep                               When I was a young man working at a gas station, a season’s rain fell in one afternoon. No one bought gas. Cars at the used car lot floated away down Turkey Creek. Their recently waxed roofs shining in the current …

On My Back At the ½ way house one of the counselors got Parkinsons He could still hoist the 20 gallon water jug onto the dispenser but then he couldn’t and became slow as a tortoise, couldn’t do the bed checks anymore and was finally let go A while later, while I was working graveyard, …

Empty Holes for Eyes These recurring false awakenings feel too close to vivid comatose states of horror that never end. I look at myself in the mirror and have no eyes. Then I realize if I really had no eyes, I wouldn’t be able to see. Which means I’m still stuck in a dream. What …