In Conversation

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 …

The Queen of Texas When my maternal grandmother was still relevant she fried porkchops. She fried chicken. She fried okra. She fried bacon. She fried sausage. She dunked cookies in coffee. She burned trash in a barrel. She answered phones. She tickled backs. She told stories. She sang songs. She broke fevers with cold wash …

  Holy Toledo (pt 2) I woke up the morning of the Underground Lit Fest snuggled in a warm bed, absolutely ecstatic I didn’t spend the night in the backseat of my Jeep, which seemed a very real possibility less than eight hours earlier. My wife roused herself, stretched, asked me what poems I intended …

Apple-Polishing Rag It’s 1:30AM on Tuesday. I have a job interview scheduled for today. But I don’t want to go. The job is dull and dirty. It will not offer me enough payroll hours, a wage equal to my years of experience or satisfaction of any kind. It will offer me a weekly paycheck— the …