when I come across a commanding one I bet my books will claim as their home. In the question section, a customer asked if this bookshelf comes armed. Will a sleek Smith & Wesson stand as complementary security to this plywood purchase? Once I stack Wright and Baldwin and Ellison together, I’ll be […]
An owl family descends upon my grandfather’s synaptic membrane as he digs the final period on a postcard to his wife he will only remember in the past tense. Within a neurological forest, the mama builds a nest by raiding the first year of marriage carved into the bark of his temporal […]
I know I’m unremarkable. I’m one of 8 billion human beings all with a pulse vibrating through limbed consciousness. By my math, the Earth hosts in the grasping range of 16 billion eyes, 80 billion fingers, 8 billion heads. Please inform me at once if you spot a 2 headed, 3 eyed and/or 20 fingered subhuman. I’ll […]
Over exposed lobster, I sat with my father in open Boston air when he gathered the language — in 1960 Attleboro, Massachusetts his uncle Mark got molested while Mark and my father scored God points as altar boys at Saint Mary’s School. Father James Porter glossed over my father’s five-year-old frame […]
You say now’s the time to squeeze San Francisco out of our 40-year-old selves. If our future heartbeats pump inside a suburban address, will we still love each other before mirrors that heave back unknown reflections? Will we ever return to our Inner Richmond neighborhood? We must shamble down Geary as aliens who […]
You reach your apartment lock, open darkness into your Hyde and Eddy apartment next to New Princess Market next to a brain encased inside a white-knuckle skull who sleeps within tent walls. In your spry youth, did you believe in a princess getting saved by a sober prince? Another beauty just ODed on Eddy across […]
three presidents ago yet you still have a 913 Kansas area code. On a ripe Saturday at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, you smile with an out-of-state mouth. As you bite into a Central Valley strawberry, your phone screams. I hear you welcome your father’s voice. He’s standing before his Kansas window. […]
At my kitchen table in Boston, the rush of shuffling a 52-card deck sends me back to my grandparent’s home where I sat with Grandpa Charles at his maroon-stained table. When I leaned over his cribbage board, we found ritual with a deck of cards by dealing, cutting, scarifying to peg up […]
on April 20th, 1999when garden soilheaped onto my organin a black tomb. At 11:29 a.m., I sought to fleeinto a library row’scompression of wordsfrom Dylan’s pump-action shotgun. Columbine is a bywordfor massacre — fifteenlung sacs couldn’t carrytheir breaths to bed. After you found mebreathing back home,your hug nearly squeezed outall the air. I walked with […]
After I wrote a gentle villanelle, I dislodged my voice box, rested that weight next to the Remington typewriter I borrowed from Barry, my ex-brother-in-law. For the duration of the night, I wouldn’t need to converse with Mary’s ashes. The cremated echo of her voice sat snug in the urn on […]