In Conversation

The Last Thing tonight here I am again sitting under the ground getting drunk on sweet tea and bourbon while listening to a Van Halen record one of the earlier ones with lead singer David Lee and the music still sounds good after all of these years and I’m sitting here trying not to think …

Peace-Sign Sweatshirt Upstairs from a Presbyterian church, a third-floor Montessori school opened its doors to children with disabilities, poor kids, delinquents, and misfits like me. We were given complete freedom, while teachers sat in classroom corners, smoking endless cigarettes. Miss Terry puffed on Eves. Her lipstick-smeared cylinders featured rows of dainty flowers, dancing as they …

Just maybe I like the casino because It’s not like other places It’s not like the grocery store It’s not like the offices or mailrooms I worked It’s not like the gas stations Or the strip malls And the fast food places And just maybe it’s the bigness of the place The bright lights and …

The People Are Like Wolves to Me by William Taylor Jr. William Taylor Jr.’s The People Are Like Wolves to Me (Roadside Press) is a book steeped in the wreckage and radiance of contemporary life—an unvarnished, booze-stained hymn to the broken, the searching, and the almost-resigned. The collection reads like a long walk through San …

Advice from the Boss Upon His Retirement Bosses are not your friend. Nope. If we want your opinion, we don’t want your opinion. If we pat you on the back, examine for stab wounds in the bathroom stall. If the Boss enters the bathroom, vamoose. You might hear something you can’t unhear. Your Boss’s heart …

Pella Felton reviews Neon Pastoral by Valerie Perreault Perreault, Valerie (2025) Neon Pastoral (Poetry Collection). The Ashland Poetry Press. 97p. $17.95 (Paperback) Winner – 2024 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize Early in Neon Pastoral, Valerie Perreault addresses the mysterious subject of her Richard Snyder Memorial Prize-winning collection with a bold promise: “You are almost ready to be born, baby”. Perreault means this in …

  If I Should Die Before My Shift Ends Ever since the great erectile dysfunction hysteria of the last week of August, 2013, I’ve written very little about my health in any public forum. I always figured my next medical update would involve a double foot amputation because I can’t leave those fucking gummi bears …

McDannold, Michele (2025). Collected Poems 2005-2025 (Poetry Collection) Roadside Press 279p. $20.00 (Paperback) Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems 2005–2025 is a bruising, beautiful chronicle of two decades lived on the raw nerve of experience. The voice here is equal parts survivor, witness, and outlaw philosopher—one who has been scorched by the world’s indifference yet still refuses …

Dexter You’re streaming that show everyone was talking about ten, twelve years ago, the one with the detached unemotional guy working as a forensic, Los Angeles PD, blood splatter expert who spends his free time hunting down rapists, murderers. You find it easy to root for Dexter as he straps tonight’s serial killer to the …

FARMS R.I.P. drizzle drifts along the hilltops dogs growl fearlessly behind rusted gates in each rotting farmhouse are the seeds of its own dissolution the forest looks green and new but humanity is old in these parts a doleful face stares out of a cracked upstairs window not with accusation just the knowledge of what …