Aug 31
The Kitchen, 2am Christmas Morning There’s no poetry in this room or very little, only what I brought with me, field rations if you will, nourishing but hardly filling. Poems are like ghosts, the clingy kind, the hungry kind, the kind that yearn to rest but don’t know how like me tonight in this kitchen …
Aug 30
FOOD GOD It’s a great place to work, but everyjob that happens in the town centers around the bar and all the no-good shits who hang out there. Screech Owl, the Nightjob, Karate Dad, Barney Jenkins, Brain Cook, Wild-Haired Wally, Jarvis the Jester, and Rafe Dingus. This may sound like a gang of wild outlaws …
Aug 29
The Numbers Vivian, the psychic at the strip mall says I have multiple great loves. She says 2, 12 & 33 are my lucky numbers. Did you dream of weak fish or a fat tummy, a coffin denotes marriage, snow foretells a pleasant journey. Maybe I should get a dog or if not, how about …
Aug 28
Miss Experience White by Milo Johnson, illustrated by John Seabury Milo Johnson’s Miss Experience White: A Poem Cycle is a blistering, hallucinatory journey into the heart of whiteness, privilege, and the monstrous machinery of supremacy. Framed as an illustrated poetic cycle and disguised in the familiar wrapping of a children’s book, this radical autofiction detonates …
Aug 27
Eraser in the earliest hours, i think of shrinking down to my smallest atom, and no longer needing to watch the world erase, no longer bearing witness to the wrecked houses and the thin wallets of the people who’ve worked hard to avoid being fed to the chattering golden teeth of Wall Street. But I …
Aug 26
Praise Jesus and Pass the Lasagna “Polish Hammer! How’s it going? Ain’t seen you in forever.” Ah, goddammit. This is the reason I try to stay out of the local Foodland. Being a carpet-bagging yankee since ’97, I know that if I’m called out in public, it’s by someone I currently or once worked …
Aug 25
The Wing Collector I sat beside him at the local bar We started talking about divorce and he asked me where I was in that process and I told him He said, I remember those feelings and then proceeded to show me pictures of insect wings that he’d collected since his divorce He explained each …
Aug 24
Save Yourself I cannot save you / I can’t even save myself. And so goes part of the chorus of Stabbing Westward’s 1998 song, “Save Yourself.” The industrial-metal band is okay as far as Nine Inch Nails wannabees go, but there’s something about that particular song that I find almost emotionally devastating. It’s about the …
Aug 16
The Screw City Poems by Richard Vargas (Roadside Press, 2025) Richard Vargas’s The Screw City Poems is a fierce, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest collection that captures the dissonant beauty of working-class life in America. With a voice that blends raw grit with lyrical sensitivity, Vargas delivers poems rooted in lived experience—poems that hum with the …
Aug 15
Becoming gods “Dear me, I think I’m becoming a god.” Emperor Vespasian just before shitting himself to death In Pompeii, you can see how the people became gods, empty spaces where life once was, near perfect molds of the imperfect. Last moments cast in ash, men and women scrambling for safety horrified at the idea …
