FARMHAND LONGS FOR LOVE FROM ABOVE

Thought regaling twilight with porch-grown ukulele melodies would suffice to lure somefowl over but since experience

Gentian Violet

For years I lied
          to everyone
                  said gentian was related
                                             to violet
                  I don’t know why

It was a Sunday morning in Delta, Mississippi when the body of the missing Negro giant washed up on the bank of the river. First news of the creature’s arrival was brought to the town by a local fisherman...

I turned over in bed and felt something weird. I put my hand behind my head and felt it was the pillow. I sat up and looked at the pillow. It was wet, pinkish-red. I said holy shit a few times, ran my

I slept with Sam in my bed when he was still a puppy, even though this is supposed to be a bad way to train a dog. He woke me up sometimes in those early months when he was never tired and always

Andy Carr is stocking shelves at his local Value King supermarket when a forty-year-old woman taps him on the shoulder and starts yelling in his face. By the woman’s word the store is out of stock of

MORNING

As a child I was taught
the small gathering of matter:

in the garage of summer,
a shelf of conch shells

flat yellow saddle oysters layered in jars,
small change purses of cicada

My parents, three hours into their marriage, ate sliders and crinkle fries. It was the summer of 1987, an Original Slider cost just 30 cents (today, one’ll run you $0.72), and there was a White Castle

But every time I listen to Brothers, I can hear her voice.

not the man

you should have fucked
the forest, not the man

the ravine holds secrets
not him

not him
secrets hold the ravine

not the man, the forest
you should have fucked

easy come,

As I headed north, to your border, darkness fell, and I could see only the two cones of light extending from the car’s headlamps. The road itself had no markings. It stretched into the black, a

About two weeks into the Coronavirus Quarantine, I began noticing some odd behaviors.

He will present it like an offering, like an opportunity, like the whole human history of men holding out shimmery circle-shaped objects as a shorthand for a promise. You, he tells her, can play the

My favorite period historically

has been the interim period

I wandered the recreated Titanic dozens of times during my middle school summer of 1998, hiding from the heat and shitty neighborhood kids by camping in front of our family’s PC. TITANIC: ADVENTURE

Lunar Flesh

Your daughter wraps her arms around your waist and asks, Does everyone have a skeleton inside? 

Already dinner is on the table. Brown rice, sticky rice, ginger duck, little saucers

I did not ask for the children. They came uninvited, as most children do, sometimes with trinkets or pets. Of their pets, the seagull is my least favorite. He is an ugly, smoke-colored creature, quite

Desert Dance

I didn’t believe tumbleweeds were real until I saw one
just like ghosts or gods or anything: I’ll believe it when I see it.
Somewhere I fused leaving & searching into the same

It was a year well-lived, but glamorous only in its simplicity– I had 6 roommates, all of us year-long volunteers packed into a one story house, where minus rent and Costco we each earned only $100-a-month in stipend.

Late June on the North Side of Town

We are in a paleteria eating lime & chamoy ice cream—
or is it sorbet? On our walk over here we talked
about ginkgo leaves & how they offer the

CHESTERTON’S FENCE

The poem is a small gate
on a country road
the rare motorist must stop
to unlatch
before going on. Even
the road is forgotten
more of a “long”-cut:

Nowhere to nowhere