Jun 02
The White Trash Devil “Ellen’s invited us to her church to see Lovella get baptized,” the wife said, having busted into the bedroom like a snack cake chomping dervish. I sat there at my desk frozen for a moment. An untrained eye would have mistaken my industry for literary endeavor. The reality of it was …
Jun 01
Caused My Heart to Bleed Not about who you are, or where you’ve been, or what you’ve seen, or when your huge creative act is going to freak out the Earth. It’s that you’re still here—still stepping two tone with the air, keeping you alive vs the reamers who darken the pest of thought—fighting for …
May 31
Learning to Drive Leaving the warehouse and tattooing every viaduct from Broadway to Pulaski Jimmy learned to drive feeling his way with each corner of the 42’ straight body truck whose keys the boss finally handed over on a Saturday morning after a passive protest of hungover no-call no-shows from everybody else following Friday payday. …
May 30
Diminishing Way It was never a cleansing rain, the mammoth clouds brought to dark extinctions, nothing breathed back into a former life, just wet against bone, really: eating through threadbare layers, awake with the dumpster diving coons, a concealed blade for when the shrill of the world came shrieking, the cap of the bottle loosened …
May 29
Performances I envision a near future where every inconvenience or failure that the president faces leads to a false flag staged attempted assassination, bullets whizzing safely past by his ears or gunfire in his general vicinity every time the price of gas goes up, every time the Strait of Hormuz opens or closes elaborate plots …
May 28
Birthday -Tomorrow’s my mother’s birthday- I told her I picked up my beer and looked at the bottle -Oh she said she shifted in her chair -Are you going to go to the cemetery- I took a drink of beer and looked out the window -I don’t know I said -Sometimes I do but not …
May 27
I Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree my wife chides when I’m a wee bit churlish— Outright rude actually. She says it, knowing how much I hate her saying it. It conjures images of the man described by more than one, as the most stressful person they have …
May 26
Demon Country The simmering cold war that existed between Lovella Sampson and I escalated into a near white trash holocaust over a pilfered extension ladder. My ex-stepmother-in-law lived in the neighboring trailer. She wanted to recycle the ladder for the few bucks she hoped the aluminum would bring. I wanted to keep the ladder in …
May 25
California Roadkill2 by GenX Core from Mystic Boxing Commission GenX Core’s California Roadkill2, the follow up to California Roadkill from the same publisher in 2022, is not a comfortable book, nor does it pretend to be. It operates in a raw, unstable register — emotionally, stylistically, and philosophically –rooted in what the novel repeatedly names …
May 24
Bird By Bird: Listing and ranking every Avian reference in “Things To Say When You Have Nothing To Say” by Kerry Trautman Friends, I have a confession: I think I was wrong about bird poems. For all the mediocre bird verses out there, something about the new collection from Kerry Trautman just made me realize …
