In Conversation

Chaos to the Fly 3 3. “Why is it, every game, every practice, feels like I just walked out of the Twilight Zone?” Brian asked. “I didn’t think it was too bad,” Wesley said. “Learn something, didja?” Milsap and Brian exchanged uneasy glances. They’d agreed beforehand not to include Wesley in any discussions concerning the …

Between Two Fields while driving on a gravel road running between two fields I watched three deer slowly emerging from out of the corn and I saw them as they stopped for just a moment turning their heads to look at me before leaping toward the other field and disappearing into the corn on a …

I Didn’t Know Who I Was Yet Or I wasn’t yet able to express myself the way I truly wanted to unless I walked around in circles in the basement, telling stories inside my own head. As a little girl, I had a voice when I sang other people’s words. In classrooms, I was overly …

Alone at my Mom’s House with the Dogs There are lizards Everywhere They sit Varied in species Dozens watching perched On the flat wood Of each fence post top They make me feel important Watching me like that Are they waiting for me To open my mouth And go boom? It’s whatever, anyway, I am …

Break Up Sex We shed our misgivings fast free of all the butting heads, past flying fur and iron filings the lick and stick of spiderwebs, trademark feathers of done days. Knocking boots on the doorstep before awkward fairy moans we gust and swoop like crop dusters all skin hunger and horror show squeals that …

Orlando Journal: June 1996 After the rejection Drowned in hops, I jump a fence off I-4, land in black mud sink to knee, sink to elbow as I fall forward, the moon holds my stupor, my silence like a chalice from which it drinks: seconds, minutes, hours, life. The world smells of decayed leaves. Twenty-two …

Air Quality Index I remember when the term IED covered the news, a shiny new term from Bush’s war in Iraq. After a while it was like it had always been part of our vocabulary. The Canadian wildfires put a focus on AQI, the particulates making up pollution levels, health risks, color codes green through …

  Chaos to the Fly 2 2. Nine o’clock in the morning, Coach Vic and Coach Pete showed up for practice dead drunk and immediately began cracking open pony boy bottles of Little King Ale. “You gotta be kidding me,” Brian said. “It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and they’re already bombed out of their …

The Imposition Nothing reminds me that I’m a large, heterosexual, white man like the way I feel thinking of that execrable, blue-blazered ham, Nick Fuentes. Eating a sandwich, bent over the sink in Bean boots and Wranglers is far less characteristic than my violent entitlement toward this modern-day Hate-Monger, Nick Fuentes. Forget cadence. There’s nothing …

Rules Are Rules The votes come in Someone wins And then you let them do What they must Because, rules are rules No matter If people are then murdered In the streets Doors broken down Or thrown into unmarked vans Because, rules are rules No matter if we kidnap Foreign leaders we don’t like Snatch …