do you remember the hooded memory of when your father grilled a slaughter of steaks on a July 4th grill that swung open like a carnivorous mouth? In your teenagehood’s C-section beginning, do you remember drifting like an untethered astronaut into the black hug of space at the planetary edge of your family’s orbiting chatter? […]
you’re shriveled up like a raisin within my raisin-skinned right testicle in a XY body I’ve claimed possession of since a C-section slice when my mother gifted me life under the Scorpio sign. At an Ocean Beach bar I want to forget, a fresh wave slams against you being born once a wavy hair brunette […]
At the beginning of a new episode during a Law & Order marathon, mom screeches out find the murderer. So I propel out the back door into unfilmed darkness defined by predator-on-prey guilt. I’m a kid with a TV head — not a nominated actor playing a tough but scared victim who gets their throat slashed within […]
Published in Still Human (Falkenberg Press, 2025)
As I drove to the hospital to visit my friend Billy during his chemo treatment, a stray lightning bolt struck a eucalyptus on the side of a wooded road. When the trunk collapsed 100 feet ahead, I skidded to a stop. Out the door, I walked up to the tree and spotted an alabaster poodle […]
Under an onion moon sliced into an Oakland sky, I move within the skin of an Evil Dead Zombie over mummy brown soil. My brain is rolled tight like a papyrus scroll before Uncle Kevin’s tombstone. A Frankenstein stroll away from his White House bones, his wife sleeps in a hospital comatose. […]
on 7th Avenue like a 7th grade bully, a mind in the wind flung my flimsy self about. I still lurched forward a block from Golden Gate Park’s shuddering leaves. I can’t remember: did I stumble through an infant morning’s crawling sunrays caught in a kidnapping wind or trudge through a windstorm day gaping through […]
at 40th and Broadway, Death’s warm body almost hugs me as a SUV almost flattens me into one of Mama’s blueberry pies hot from a Thanksgiving oven three decades ago and it’s still steaming somewhere within my cluttered hippocampus. At 40th and Broadway, thankfully I’m not a blueberry pie. According […]
Published in Still Human (Falkenberg Press, 2025)
I stumble into my skinny studio at Avenue C and East 4th. After a double bodega shift, I fail to dish out a fresh offering of Sally’s high-protein low-carb salmon-flavored food. Normally that’s Samantha’s job yet this week it’s fallen to me. Every time I’ve served Sally dinner, she never even purrs with appreciation. I […]