In Conversation

If You’re Reading This, Then I Must Have Managed to Write a Column Yesterday So, my plan for last weekend ideally involved relaxing for hours on the front porch with my feet propped up and a book in my lap. I even had my clothes picked out, white linen trousers and a thin sky-blue button-down …

The Devil’s Haircut I was in sixth grade when my mother, fed up with the long blonde hair I’d resist brushing, sick of the knots and tangles that grew like nettle-ridden shrubs underneath, took me to Esther. Esther was, in theory, a beautician, which is what people called hair stylists back then, but I never …

5 Haikus Tell me, Green Buddha, as I spark you into my lungs, what is True Zen? In cold Cleveland’s streets where we gather, seeking warmth, what smoke will heal us? Green Buddha, sit and bless the altar of my lungs with sweet incense smoke. March Snow in Cleveland, blown so thick even the pigs …

Cigarettes It is like this: I go outside to throw a plastic bag of garbage in the bin. I see the neighbors across the street. They are older than me, maybe younger. It is difficult to tell these days. She has short purple hair and he is obese in a misshapen LONGHORNS t-shirt. Both lean …

Soul Auger The poet had written, “kneel to auger the soil,” but misspoke, and so, I auger my soul, drilling towards the core, hoping to find some essential, unique thing, all the while fearing what might emerge. Ghosts long buried might arise to haunt the peace of this new life, or a subterranean chain reaction …

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 …