Apr 15
Splitting Heirs It occurs to me, probably more often than it should, that I have yet to see my twenty-two-year-old son in the company of a female. His life is his own, of course, to do with as he sees fit, but I see a lot of me in a lot of him. So, why …
Apr 08
Hey, Did I Ever Tell You I’m a Writer? On casual Fridays while most of my co-workers on the office side of the factory wall eschew collared shirts for Tees emblazoned with the insignia of their favorite sports team, I pimp a shirt advertising the cover of my latest short story collection, Thrift Store …
Apr 01
Gramma K’s Apocalypse I would have rather been anywhere other than where I was, sprawled on the olive shag carpeting of Gramma K’s efficiency apartment, cringing beneath the beatific gaze of Pope John Paul II peering down from a three-year-old calendar tacked to the nicotine-stained wall. A Love Boat rerun played on the television. It …
Mar 25
The Thomas Jefferson of the Pell Grant Elites For a brief period, I was a community college scholar. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knew me as a fifth-grade genius. During the intervening years, I may have fallen off the educational map. Spectacularly some would say, through my year as an …
Mar 18
A Tale of Two Idiots, My Ten-Year Friendship with Brian Fugett Before Zygote In My Coffee, there was Babel. Babel was a monthly online literary journal edited by Victor Thorn. Victor Thorn you may not remember was a bit of a wild man, himself, a man who never met a conspiracy theory he couldn’t connect back …
Mar 11
Scream For Me, Long Beach!! The carnie had three teeth in his head. They peeked out from behind his thin lips like shit-dipped Tic-Tacs every time he talked around the unfiltered Camel smoldering in the corner of his mouth. “It’s a dollar a dart, kid. Dollar a dart. Bust any balloon, you pick a poster.” …
Mar 04
The Polish Hammer Poetry Corner Beards Back in my day, a beard was a woman you’d agree to marry when too many people began questioning your need for such an extensive Barbie collection and your fixation with drinking Rose wine with your brunch. Nowadays, everyone has a beard. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time …
Feb 25
The Polish Hammer Poetry Corner Just Another Casualty of the Industrial Revolution I didn’t set out to be a factory worker. Near as I can remember, I didn’t set out to be much of anything. I knew I was poor. I knew most every path would entail working for a living, likely existing paycheck …
Feb 18
The Polish Hammer Poetry Corner The Ballad of Extended Adolescence Twenty miles away from where I’m sitting right now writing this column, my twenty-two-year-old son is sitting in a rented house staring at a computer screen of his own. He’s not writing a column or working on a novel that’s only going to fizzle out …
Feb 11
The Polish Hammer Poetry Corner The Polish Hammer Strikes Again I’ve been doing this for a long time. Writing, that is, with the intention of allowing any number of unknown people to judge me by the bullshit I put down on paper. I started getting my poetry and stories published in the early nineties, right …
