The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
From “After Talk”
You touched my chest with your fingertips
as I lay next to you trying to sleep.
“Try to rest,” you said, by which you meant,
Gird your loins, my love, and prepare your heart,
for tomorrow I may leave you.
February Thaw
Outside, crowded maple trees
soften themselves and glisten.
Weeping, they unroll their leaves.
Poems in the Rooms of the Dying
On the subject of serial killers, poet Ruth Danon writes that they “leave notes, write in code.” They “grow increasingly impatient.”
“They hate the dark,” she muses. “They want to be found.”
So do poets. And Danon’s latest collection, Word Has It (Nirala Publications, 2018) reads like a series of notes dispatched from the brink of an apocalypse. Birds fall from the sky. Red-eyed people weep. There is blood. Dark, ominous omens of all shapes and sizes rain down.
A Review of Elizabeth Mikesch’s Niceties
The narrator of Elizabeth Mikesch’s Niceties is not interested in explaining her life to you.
The Chattering Classes
The masses chatter wherever they mass,
A Review of Andrew Brininstool’s Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession
Andrew Brininstool’s debut short story collection, Crude Sketch Sketches Done in Quick Succession, hurts because it hits home.
The Semiotics of Portrait Painting: Carmiel Banasky’s The Suicide of Claire Bishop
Carmiel Banasky’s debut novel is itself a decades-long plunge.
Ports of Long Beach, California
We were driving home in the Subaru, we were
sitting on the couch with
nothing in our hands and the movie paused.
Two Poems
When I glue the hybrid, its sound makes a memory like bones or like a pyre for all the oceans one can feel.
Two Poems
I’m blaspheming traffic.
I’m mincing some celery.
I’m holding your hand while you eat.
The Children
The snow was falling on the beach/
and so the children/
gathered it/
into their hands.