The aborted poems I deserted inside my Underwood typewriter crawl underneath hammerhead letters. They never left the metal womb of their creation. As Samuel suckles milk only Susan can provide, the letters to the elegy I type strike the heads of every poetic deformity. One lacks a leg, another survives with […]
One season after my wife died, Mailwoman Susan delivered a monkey to my home. “Who’s this from, Susan?” “It’s from me. I’m retiring and I want to give you a hairy gift.” “Are you giving everyone you delivered mail to a monkey?” “Different animals. I’m giving your speedy neighbor Larry a cheetah.” “But why are […]
In the kick-my-teeth talk between space and gravity, my brain undulates against the rhythmic kick of Jupiter’s spin tossing about orbiting oceans by the girth of her magnetic field where I read The Inferno within her Great Red Spot when your voice calls me home calls me home to a Europan hitchhiker staring back at […]
I cupped Kansas soil in my harvest hands. Now on Martian land, skin-to-soil contact is never authorized as hominid microbes would tarnish this crimson signature. I am an alien five radio wave minutes away from your milk flow where our son latches onto the globe of your atmospheric breast exposed in […]
I trip on sidewalk trash next to an overfilled can at Ruby and 38th. In this Mosswood neighborhood, I pay water and electricity and rent to breathe in a bedroom engulfed in white paint within America’s monetized kingdom. Two blocks away in Mosswood Park, tents rest supine on city grass where unhoused hearts […]
the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Great Boston Fire of 1872, and the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906 crowds the chemical space of My Great-Grandma’s Kitchen Fire of 1977. Flames climbed her walls like rats before red teeth gnawed into her skin. Shall we call this fire great or a lesser […]
populate my north Oakland neighborhood where I habitually walk my rat terrier Batman and his spiky ears in still-forming dawns. Last week, as we slid past a locked gate at 37th and West, a Rottweiler barked up against the metal as if we aimed to torpedo her home. I jumped, my city stupor […]
Interview with Keith Gaboury Q: Poetry and the sciences are often placed at odds with one another, whether they are truly all that fundamentally opposite or not. What drew you to this issue of Popular Mechanics as a source for your erasure? A: I’ve always been interested in science. I remember reading Scientific American as […]
I read my horoscope in coffee grains. With my pulverized future in my denim pocket, I go out walking. At West and 37th, in front of Spokeland, I spot a lost cat poster pinned to a street pole like another messiah I don’t believe in. More than the holes in a crucified man’s […]
At MacArthur and Maple across from Diamond Market where the beer and smokes preach my name, I jam myself onto a 57 outbound within a swath of wedged bodies. On a seat for a human pregnant, disabled or senior, you — with spry skin, no pregnancy or limp — flick on a lighter to speed […]