Jan 09
A Matter of Taste: Poems of Hunger and Thirst by Deborah Ketai Citizens for Decent Literature Press 2026, Winner of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize Deborah Ketai’s A Matter of Taste is a collection obsessed—in the most productive sense—with appetite: for food, for sex, for meaning, for language, for life itself. Hunger is not merely …
Jan 08
I Forgot The Name Of The Place I’m Going To The menacing clouds covered up the Big Dipper The roads have started to look similar And stitched together by the yellow lines And leading, so they say, all to one place. I drove twice, all night and day, caffeinated For a love that I crave …
Jan 07
Like a Virgin Was it Groucho Marx who said he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin? I was way too young to see her in her 1954 appearance on What’s My Line? Our family didn’t even own a TV then, but having just turned two a couple of weeks earlier, I’d never have …
Jan 06
What the Hell Did I Just Live Though? 2025, A Year I’m Not Comfortable Reviewing With 2025 a corpse shot in the head and dumped in a ditch, and 2026 racing out of the gate like a retarded child piloting a missile-laden Chinook, it is tempting to piss this column away just reviewing bullshit that …
Jan 05
Dinner Will Be Ready Soon Thomas climbed out of his car and headed for the front door of his house. It had been a long day at work. “Hey, honey,” he said to his wife. No response. She must be busy. He went into the kitchen and found her preparing dinner in the dark. In …
Jan 04
old men and young boys baseball game companions silently hoping for seventh inning home team rally while fathers lost in rat race dreams dead # # # # alone at kitchen table three in the morning bergman films running through graying artist’s mind rediscovering reality of love and death in god’s silence # # # …
Jan 03
Mourning Michael Landon When I was in high school, my friend’s mother was obsessed with the actor Michael Landon. From the Little House on the Prairie to the Highway to Heaven she couldn’t get enough of Michael Landon or stop praising the easy perfection of Michael Landon’s hair. On Wednesday nights, my friend went to …
Jan 02
If It Ain’t Broke another late afternoon sun another early start to another long night of drinking and you would think by now after so many years of me doing this same thing over and over again that somehow I would have managed to have come up with something new but as I once heard …
Jan 01
The Scary Parts by Allan MacDonell (Punk Hostage Press) The Scary Parts is a compact, sharp-edged book about fear—not the cinematic kind, but the quiet, professional, social, and existential varieties that accrue as life narrows its options. Allan MacDonell approaches fear the way a seasoned essayist and fiction writer would: circling it, baiting it with …
Dec 31
raw gritty lustful we met at a bar / i know, so cliché / our first night together awakened my libido / every hole was stuffed and licked / we were raw, gritty, lustful / sex had never felt this powerful / so animalistic / so alive then our lowest of lows were met with …
