In Conversation

Sneakers A couple years after graduating from high school I took the Greyhound bus from Times Square, NYC to San Francisco, California After a brief stint of being homeless in The City I found a small room to rent out in a house in the Mission District which was unlike any neighborhood I had experienced …

Shake Hands with the Man in My Hand by Daryl Gussin from There’s Only Peace in Death Press Daryl Gussin’s Shake Hands with the Man in My Hand (There’s Only Peace in Death Press) is a collection that thrives on contradiction: sincerity and irony, intimacy and estrangement, humor and dread. The attached poems reveal a …

Progress 1. It started when they sat us little girls at the kids table so after we ate we could color with crayons and stay out of momma’s hair while she started sighing dramatically And clanging those dishes which only barely muffled the sounds of men drinking and talking shit of little boys chasing and …

Well, when I should have been writing this week’s column, I was instead writing the first chapter of a story that may or may not come together. I have some ideas moving forward. Not sure if it’s going to the back burner or if I’m going to give it more love in the coming week. …

Old Joke Her husband thought he was a chicken. When the summer was over he perched on the back of the sofa and while she played solitaire he tilted his head as if listening for the rumble of worms, or slept with one eye open. If she offered him a bowl of cereal he picked …

Liberation we went to the medieval days show with knights and jousting, a king, beautiful queen and Wench Jo, that’s what she called herself. I watched the battles and cheered, it was fun but it wasn’t real, and the speeches and the heraldry and the pageantry it was great, but it was false. Wench Jo …

last library patron of the day fifty-two and two decades yelling at kids and crazies and the last one here tonight he’s high on coke or whatever he was doing locked up in the bathroom for an hour flinging books across the room like the world’s most violent critic i just stand there and let …

Truck Stop Logic The waitress with cigarette fingertips said love was mostly people leaving before the coffee got cold. Outside, a one-eyed dog slept beneath a Pepsi machine like it had finally forgiven the world. I nodded as if any of it could save me from driving back home alone again. Leon Drake is a …

Dealer by Iván Salinas from There’s Only Peace in Death Press Dealer by Iván Salinas, published by There’s Only Peace in Death Press, reads less like a collection and more like a live wire — erratic, charged, and impossible to hold without feeling the current. What emerges across these poems is not just a poetics …

The Pattern Have you noticed the pattern? They take turns saying whose bombing and whose ceasing but there’s no sight of peace? Haven’t you noticed there is no ceasefire? Ever? I wanna strike now, run out of my house now, screaming noooooooo at the top of my lungs but I don’t wanna look crazy and …