Sep 10
With Her Hair on Fire by Christy Prahl (Roadside Press, 2025) Christy Prahl’s With Her Hair on Fire is a collection of prose poems that read like dispatches from the liminal zones between memory and invention, confession and fable. The chapbook brims with domestic detail—laundromats, hibiscus bushes, yellow houses, hummingbird feeders—yet each poem veers quickly …
Sep 09
Sons and Fathers My son is nine weeks into his Hydra experience, working beside me in the chrome shop, plating components which will eventually become hydraulic cylinders used on an array of dump trucks, garbage trucks, cranes, and tractors. Nine weeks without missing a day of work, without so much as a single instance of …
Sep 08
Most Likely To Recede PBS PSA: when you grow up learnin’ songs such as The B-I-B-L-E yes that’s the book for me and if The Devil Doesn’t Like it He Can Sit On A Tack (OUCH!) it’s unlikely you’ll become a Rhodes scholar, let alone America’s Next Top Model. Cheated from the start. I’m still …
Sep 07
In Joliet In Joliet, I lost a lot of money, first in the bowling alley with my cousin, then in the casino. My cousin can bowl. Bowl and hustle. “Your own flesh and blood?” I said. “Why not?” he said and took a fifty off me. At the casino, we met these girls, a bachelorette …
Sep 06
Dogs Her dogs went to the stick library every day. They and all dogs didn’t need a library card, just respect the honor system of returning the sticks back to an abandoned snack shack for the next dog’s use. At the Town Hall meeting, which approved this she had brought her dog, a sweet pit …
Sep 05
A GRADUATION POEM Tonight my son graduates from high school and the last year has floated between sadness and misery with a pile of shit grades and complaints about teachers and very little acceptance of responsibility or acknowledgment that you need to work to succeed and work before you complain about the oppressors the bosses …
Sep 04
(Un)formulaic Formula When you feel like you write a haiku in a dream, but do not transfer those words outside your brain’s portal. Can’t speak. Maybe you swallowed the page. Your own writing tastes better than a bottle of baby formula. Juliet Cook doesn’t fit inside an Easy-Bake Oven and rarely cooks. Her poetry has appeared in …
Sep 03
Home Coming A homecoming… returning from whence you came a mother’s midwestern town a war-hero memorial Five states in three days at 90 MPH mile-after-mile past corn fields metal grain silos glistening in white-hot heartland sun It was… the land of Superman of the “decent people” Simple clapboard houses always set back nowhere to stop …
Sep 02
I’m Pre-Emptively Tired of This Future Bullshit, or It’s That Roll Tide Time of Year, Again You can tell football season is upon us once again by the way the boys on the shop floor swagger back and forth between their machines. For the next several months, eighty-five percent of their collective self-worth is going …
Sep 01
These Are the Times Feel the heavy pulse Of feet on glossy streets And the strained rotten breaths Eating up the sky. These are the times we live in— The slog of rapid tears With stretched vinyl flashbacks, Bell bottom jeans And perfumes, ‘79. So let your credit slump With solar powered androids And whores …
