In Conversation

No One Here Gets Out Alive I must have been sixteen when I took down the posters above my bed of Cheryl Ladd and Jaclyn Smith in beach bikinis with contoured stomachs and lipstick smiles – Charlie’s sexiest angels – and replaced them with a leather-collared close-up of Jim Morrison. When my father ripped Morrison …

What’s In Your Coffee? (for Brian Fugett) The Ohio River is bursting at the banks. Joe Burrow hits a streaking barn burner across the middle. I pass this woman drinking in a parking lot, dressing down a happy face painted on a building across the street. And the question arises, as if from the cackling …

I WISH TO ACHIEVE THE CONFIDENCE OF A MAN WHO UPLOADS THE SAME FACEBOOK PROFILE PICTURE 10-15 TIMES, EACH VERSION MORE ZOOMED-IN AND PIXELATED THAN THE LAST I’m killing ants on the kitchen counter. I can hear them crunching beneath my finger like Oreo crumbs. “Sorry,” I say, flicking another mangled corpse into a graveyard …

You’ve Been Milted I’ve managed to escape the factory for two whole days and I’m intent on wiling the hours away in as lazy a manner as I can muster, sitting beside my wife on the front porch, watching the world pass by. For this brief moment, I experience the closest sensation to contentment the …

The days are packed not like sardines. Like pennies rolled tight. Ends folded precise, insides adding up to what? I wish for you a more simple life. For the necessity of washing fruit to be all you need to radicalize you. I’ve straddled the threshold my whole life and I suppose I’m lucky to never …

Book Warm shelling a city library during a war and burning all the books in it you could call that a crime because books hold the stories of the people who wrote them and by destroying the books you are erasing the history of those people but the real crime is to keep the war …

Hospice Hospice has a pamphlet that maps out the end-of-life stages where the pathway to death can be followed like a roadmap That both fascinated me and brought me comfort but I could never figure out why It had a community feel to it Something we all do in the same way but I couldn’t …

Your Pale Gray Eyes On this awful, bathrobe morning, I wonder what you look like now. Could your ashes fit into my coffee mug? How about our bowl on the dish rack? The one I bogarted the popcorn from curled up watching “Mad Men” when you got pissed I listed all the ways I’d fuck …

Bombs Bringing Us Together If the end of the world comes, there won’t be anything I can do except stand on the porch and listen to the Grackles gulp their last song, hoping that on the next try, humanity will succeed, a rose without any thorns, kindness will be what truly matters. If the end …

We Survive We are exhausted, war torn and weather beaten survivors We have been starving on the streets and a stranger in our own homes We’re the Dudeists that still attend church 3 times a year to make their mother in law smile We are the world’s poets and back alley artists whose brilliance will …