Recent Posts
Fool at High Noon
Fool finally realizes why the marshall
deputized him and then blew town.
First thing he’ll have to do is buy
a gun—fast—then learn how to use it
A Review of Terese Svoboda’s Great American Desert
Great American Desert By Terese Svoboda Ohio State Press, 2019 Terese Svoboda opens her 18th book Great American Desert with an epigraph that reminds readers that many of the greatest civilizations are now desert wastelands--and that the West is...
La Edad de la Ternura
Every day after classes
we pick up Sonia from La Facultad.
That first year when she thought herself a doctor
and tried to help El Pedigueno with a stick through his hand.
Two Poems
In the painting the couple stands with their hands / touching and enough apart to notice the shaggy gray dog
Infamous
breaks the pattern of pre- fixes and suffixes not taking the stress: [in-fuh-muhs] which makes me think: muh-fuhs as in what you muh-fuhs lookin at? which could have been an infamous last question, given that those muh-fuhs stared at me all the...
The Island
Owen watched Aubrey press her palm into a thick patch of speckled moss girdling the trunk of an old Douglas fir. The move was gentle and precise, how a mime might seek an invisible wall, and he couldn’t help but imagine her locked up in some dark basement, kidnapped, as he suspected she’d been as a child.
Two Poems
Leave that Tiffany bling. It’s a pile of cold cash. / Facile, faceted carbon copies.
Does Yours Have a Heart, Too?
Once there was a person who was tasked with reducing a mountain into a flat plain. For a shopping mall. For a housing development. For a prairie. For the gemstones within. They moved their family to a new home at the base of the mountain, which was tall enough to keep...
Some Words About Proverbs
I’ve played my part as tourist in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, I skipped out of the way of ring-chiming bicycles. I drank Amstel beer under an awning while an afternoon rain dotted the surface water of the Singel canal.
Review of WHERE WE GO WHEN ALL WE WERE IS GONE by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone is haunting literary work, and I mean that literally: ghosts populate the book. The collection is set in modern Japan, where the dead, the undead, and countless characters from Japanese pop culture and cultural myth struggle to exist, and coexist, at the edges of the human world.
At Her Mirror
She slips out of her dress, turns
this way and that, cursing her breasts,