Unhoused Woman Encounters Micropenis Energy Outside the Golden Nugget
The sun has yet to set and
here you are, slurring your words.
Your girlfriend is too, but
she is savvy enough
to distance herself from you.
She paces half a block away,
sweaty, arms crossed.
She wanders near and calls
your name, Tad. Why don’t you
leave her be, Tad? Sleep it off,
Tad. Let’s bang it out, Tad.
(Better yet, don’t, Tad.) What
daggers did this dirty-faced,
tattered-trousered grandmother
sling, that sliced you so, Tad?
Was it her cabbage-scented
perfume which seduced you
to bray—swine-like—into
the cheeks of this “Fucking Hag”?
You tower above her, your
fatback moist, your jowls pink
from lack of air to your
middling brain, veins in your neck
and hamhocks bulging. Did she
take your last twenty bucks at
the Blackjack table? Did she
refill all your empties
at the casino bar? Did she
run away with the butcher
when you were six? (And what if
she did? If your dad was
the bore that you are, Tad, I
would too.) And what’s wrong with
these passers-by, who just pass by
you, casting their gaze aside—
myself included?
Annie’s News
Annie’s fingers were sinewy, overcooked chicken wings which delicately stirred seven sugar cubes into her roadside diner Folgers. She lifted the mug to herpes-scarred lips which slithered past blackened, crooked teeth and away from mottled gums. Annie’s lashless, pinpoint eyes—wide set in that mangy, misshapen skull—were slivers of cool coal jutting from a jagged canyon of cheekbones. A stench of curdled milk mixed with dumpster cabbage wafted across the table as she spoke. Her slurping, sucking, wheezing words slammed into me with the force of a Mack truck T-boning a nun: “Baby, we’re pregnant!”
I’ve never been happier.
It Happens
Mute sailboats bob at the edge of the earth, like opal pyramids pointing towards Heaven. The vast maw of the lake sucks the sound from the city.
The balance is off.
Here, your mind is a wide open prairie on a smooth spring morning. This is your favorite place: there are no distractions, no work, no phone, no music; only momentum.
You exchange pleasantries with another swimmer as you wade in, knee-deep. “How is it?” You ask her.
“Nice this morning. Not too cold. Not wavy.” She bends an arm back to unzip her wetsuit. “Cops pulled a body out just as I was arriving.”
“What? You’re kidding.” You stand stunned, heels sinking into the silty bottom.
She shrugs. “It happens. Enjoy your swim.”
The city slouches heavily on one shoulder. The low commotion of early morning traffic noise, like a fog that never dissipates, is punctured by the roar of motorcycles or the lamentation of an ambulance. Engines and rubber and tons of steel clatter and rumble along Lake Shore Drive, an eight-lane highway that spoons the shoreline.
On your other shoulder, the soft, quiet pull of a gauzy sky. Lake Michigan is a slate flag undulating in a brisk breeze. The head of a golden retriever glides closer to shore, stick firmly clenched in jaw. Mute sailboats bob at the edge of the earth, like opal pyramids pointing towards Heaven. The vast maw of the lake sucks the sound from the city.
The balance is off.
You wade deeper, pulling the drawstring of your wetsuit zipper up your spine. You fasten the velcro tab at the nape of your neck. You dip your hot pink latex swim cap into the lake and open it up, turn it inside out, then stretch it over your head. The brightly-colored cap highlights your whereabouts for boats and for the lifeguards who will arrive later when the beaches begin to crowd with vacationing families and suburban teens.
Waist-deep, you bend your knees and stretch the rubber collar of your wetsuit to let the lake in. The cold water shocks your flesh. Your heart skips two beats. You spit into your goggles, rinse them, and suction them to your face, inhale deeply and thrust forward. Your arms crawl, pulling you through the lake, legs kick rhythmically, toes pointed to maximize efficiency. Your heart rate spikes. Five strokes, breathe—you open your mouth at the corner to keep from swallowing a wave. Five strokes, breathe—the odd intervals keep you looking at alternating sides.
To your left is the steel-reinforced concrete lake wall, slimy and barnacled. Above it, the Lakefront Path: an artery often clogged by bicyclists, runners, sightseeing tourists, and sauntering downtown workers staring at their phones. Beyond that is Lake Shore Drive and seven-figure condos with floor-to-ceiling windows which glint in the glow of a rising sun. In the afternoon, the skyscrapers cast deep shadows into this stretch of lake. To your right, an empty expanse of harbor. “The Playground” will soon fill with idling powerboats, piloted by spoiled north shore kids. They wear floral-print board shorts and monokinis, and spend hours sipping Old Style or White Claw, flashing toothy selfies for Instagram.
Most days, the lake is cloudy and you can’t see five feet. Here, disaster lurks. Your head is up more than down, looking around for stronger swimmers who might barrel towards you through the din like an eighteen-wheeler rounding a switchback on a narrow mountain pass. You watch for drunks on Sea-Doos, veering too close to shore. You imagine the aftermath: concussed and drowning, no lifeguards nearby to save you. Far-fetched, sure, but possible—it happens.
Today though, the lake is crystalline. In the close hug of your wetsuit, through foggy goggles, you see the downed light post resting on the bottom. You wonder what kind of car wreck launches a light post that far: careening over a guardrail and past a sloping concrete beach, fully fifty yards from Lake Shore Drive. You shiver through a cold pocket and try to regain your rhythm—five strokes, breathe, five strokes, breathe. Garbage litters the rocks, twenty feet below your nose. You see shapeless plastic and metallic things, sun-faded and sand-covered; beer bottles, soda cans, and an entire park district trash can. You spy a solitary fish sucking between stones and debris. It’s a sallow and pitted creature, not even worth a second glance. You become tangled in a fishnet of weeds, so you pause briefly, treading water as you remove them from your face and between your fingers. Your wetsuit buoys you; you bob at the surface like the beacon that marks your turnaround point. You think again about the body. It happens.
The waves push and pull. You gain speed. Your arms are tiring, shoulders burning with the effort. Your neck is raw where you mismatched the velcro. You find your rhythm. You no longer need to count your strokes to breathe. It happens: your body remembers. It’s like writing a letter to an old friend, or fingering a C-major scale on your junior high trumpet.
A pair of swimmers pass you on their way back to shore. You envy the efficiency of their stroke, the power in their arms. You rock gently in their wake. You sneak a peek back—they’re already disappearing into the distance.
You crawl towards the marker, the furthest you’ve made it this season. The waves are getting choppy as you take a wide turn around the beacon and head towards the beach. Eight hundred meters down, eight hundred to go.
Like a calf without gold
Like gold without blood
Like blood without creamy fat
Like fat without salt
Like salt without a shaker
Like a Shaker without a psalm
Like psalms without palms
Like palms of plaited brass
Like a brass band without a battlefield
Like a field without cattle
Like a battle without fire
Like fire without air
Like air without the soft slurp
of purple lungs
Like lungs without ribs
Like ribs without tips
Like a tip without a top
Like a top-hat without a song
Like songs without words
Like words without starlight
Like starlight without
the velvet-curtained dark
Like curtains drown the dawn
Like dawn without wings
Like wings without a tail
Like a tail without the comet
Like a comet without ice
Like ice without cream
Like cream without the cow
Like a cow without her calf
bleeding in the grass
A folk healer tends to a sick cow in Muurame, Finland 1929
I haven’t written much (poetry or otherwise) lately. This poem dates from late 2022. I got a new job in Saint Paul, so I packed up a U-Haul with a few house plants and musical instruments and moved in with Leah’s Dad in the suburbs, while Leah finished packing up our place in Chicago. This poem comes from that period; while I was eager to begin a new job and explore a new city, I was certainly missing Leah, missing my friends, missing Chicago. It’s a poem of love and loss and hope.
Kids All Over Hell
Shrewsbury Sentinel Factory children's party (Geoff Charles, 1950)
So anyway, we drove over
to that main drag there
and there’s a bank
and well everything looks closed
and where in the Sam hell?
We’re in the middle of nowhere.
We walk past the VFW
I thought we were goin to the VFW
and we get to some little shop,
like an individual
an individual individualized
little shop
—a bakery!—
Well, we still don’t know
what the hell’s goin on.
We walk into that shop and
BOOM!—
The lights turn on
and there’s all kindsa people,
must’ve been twenty,
twenty-five people there—
your sister’s friends,
Adam called all of ‘em.
And kids all over Hell,
and there was a smorgasbord.
2024 Highlights!
Aura
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Rizz
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Simp
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Ick
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Aura 〰️ Rizz 〰️ Simp 〰️ Ick 〰️
**NOLA with friends. Technically Dec 27-30 2023, but who’s counting? What a time to travel. No Christmas closings, no New Years mobs. Idealistic. Best friends, better times in that historic, jazz-filled jelly roll of a southern town.
**Receiving a Third Place (CASH PRIZE) in the Deanna Tulley Memorial Multimedia Poetry contest for my piece: “A Lonely Undergrad Wanders Into Gorilla Sushi on a Friday Night”.
**Many of these highlights are work-related. Please forgive me, but I feel immense gratitude that I get to work in a field (and for an organization) that allows me to use my creativity. I know that not everyone can say that about their work. I am honored to have this position. In February, I trekked to Duluth with my colleagues Derek and Evan. There, we set up shop in an old Masonic Lodge which we converted into a concert hall for one evening. Among the three musical acts we recorded: Aby Wolf and Eric Mayson (performing on the Masonic Lodge’s pipe organ!). I directed video, operated cameras and did the video post-production for this. Derek Ramirez captured audio and was FOH audio engineer, and Evan Clark piloted the ship, setting up all the lighting, operating cameras, and making sure I wasn’t fucking anything up too badly.
Check out “Eyes On Me” at 38:33
**Later in February, more work colleagues Evan Clark, Alex Simpson, Megan Lundberg and I set up at a Minneapolis bar—the Hook and Ladder—for The Current’s Winter Digout with local band Kiss the Tiger and two Chicago groups that blew my socks off: Friko and Brigitte Calls Me Baby. I was on audio for this one and did the mixes for Friko and Kiss the Tiger:
**Only a couple of weeks after the Winter Digout, I got to do a live classical broadcast, again with my colleagues Evan Clark and Megan Lundberg. This was the Before Bach’s Birthday Bash Banger with Michael Barone (host of Pipedreams). I did the audio capture and mix for live broadcast on YourClassical and YouTube live.
**April was a busy month at the office! It was Minnesota Music Month, so we had a plethora of live music events to capture and produce over that month. Governor Tim Walz (before becoming Kamala Harris’s VP pick) stopped by MPR HQ and declared April 10 Minnesota Music Day. But five days before that, my colleagues and I ventured to the Turf Club in Saint Paul to record four music acts, including the legendary Minnesotan, and co-founder of Low, Alan Sparhawk. This was only a few short months after the passing of his beloved wife and partner Mimi. I was a camera operator and did the video post-production for Sparhawk’s performance. I wish we could have captured some of the more sublime moments (his haunting songs to Mimi), but due to some unforeseen technical issues, we were only able to release a few of the songs.
**Another highlight of April was my brother-in-law Adam and 9-year-old nephew Fischer coming to town to see the World Series 2024-bound Dodgers beat up on the Twinkies. We had great seats to watch Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani knock the Twins around.
Moments before Fischer took a leak in the Metro bus stop
**Still in April…on a Saturday, I was asked to come into the studio to record Frank Turner on our glorious Neve console at MPR. He was a good dude. My colleague Peter was on video for this one.
**It wasn’t ALL work, of course. On the last weekend of April, I ran the Chippewa Trail 20-miler in northwestern Wisconsin. Leah and Churro were my support squad as I finished my longest race since 2019!
**We also got to go to Chicago twice, for a pair of weddings! Once in May for Lily and EZ and again in July to witness the wedding of dear-dear friends Margaret & Tommy. These were some of the happiest times of the year!
**Leah and I like to treat each other to nice dinners out every so often, and 2024 was filled with new and delicious restaurants. Monteverde in Chicago with Russell and Stephanie, High Five ramen and Pequods (in the same day!) with Leah, Peter, and Kris, then in Minneapolis: Nixta, Kim’s (RIP), Owamni (the best meal I’ve had since we moved to the Twin Cities), and Kahluna…even though I forgot my Lactaid at home and subsequently destroyed their restroom, it was a delicious meal. Would definitely go again.
**One of my proudest moments of 2024 was releasing an album in June. Even before I could afford my first piece of recording gear, I dreamed of one day recording an album. 2024 was the thirtieth anniversary of playing in my first band and discovering shows at the Minot Collective Cultural Centre, so I planned my album An Echo in the Dark around bands that I have played in through the years. It was a fun project, but I don’t think I’ll be undertaking another any time soon. You can hear the album wherever you listen to music, but my Electronic Press Kit video may have gotten the best reception of all:
**Another work-related highlight was recording the band Shannon & The Clams at the Current studios. I was unfamiliar with their music at the time I recorded the audio, but instantly fell in love with their sound, and even more so, the heart-wrenching story behind their new album. You’ve got to see the interview here:
**I told you my job was rad, right? So then the day after Shannon & The Clams, I got to direct and post-produce a video for Iron & Wine in our studio. I loved this song in particular. Sam was such a humble, sweet dude.
**One week after Iron & Wine, Leah and I set out on our annual June pilgrimage to Duluth. 3RUN2 crew was there {in force} for Grandma’s Marathon and the Garry Bjorlund Half. So nice to see old friends that weekend and run a race in favorable conditions.
**During the first week of August, I flew to Vermont with my colleague Jeanne to record some content for YourClassical MPR’s Performance Today. I was directing video for these interviews between host Fred Child and many of the classical luminaries who attended Marlboro Music Festival 2024. Vermont was gorgeous!
**In late summer, I got to see some dear friends from Minot, who I haven’t seen in 23 years! Best buddy from high school days, BJ Moore was in town playing with his excellent band Oriska. It was so nice to reconnect with him. Then old friends Brent Braniff and Nick Leet visited me in September. I took them on a tour of MPR and Brent took some pictures of me back at our home. Man, these visits were food for the soul.
**Also in September, I got to direct and post-produce video of LEGENDS Gillian Welch and David Rawlings for Radio Heartland. They were amazing to work with! This video has already received over 60,000 views on YouTube:
**October 6 was a busy day! Leah and I ran the TC 10 miler that morning. She was running ahead of me until the last half mile, at which point I managed to catch up to her and we crossed the finish line together…
**But we only had a few hours to recover because I had my first-ever poetry reading that afternoon! Thanks to Paul VanDyke from Veterans Telling Stories, who invited me to read during the Sogn Valley Art Festival at the Cannon Falls VFW. What an experience. I loved sharing my poetry with the small crowd there and meeting the other veteran writers.
…and then later that evening, we saw Michael Kiwanuka and Brittney Howard at The Palace. Speaking of concerts, so much good live music in 2024: Arlo Parks, Scrunchies, Carnage the Executioner, Monica LaPlante with Tommy, Christy Costello with cousin Adam, Mates of State, Al Church at the MN State Fair, Vikingur Olafson playing the Goldberg Variations! Dillinger Four with Adam & Peter, Charles Lloyd at Ordway with Peter and Tommy. Great year for concerts.
**In October, we had a visit from Tommy (Margaret was very busy working with the election on the horizon), and in November, Rick & Jenny were here. So nice to see Chicago friends in Saint Paul.
**On the writing front, it’s been a relatively quiet year, however, in October, I had my first-ever prose piece published in Slippery Elm {2024}. The editor of the journal really must have enjoyed the piece, because I learned in late November that he nominated it for a Pushcart Prize! Quite an honor to be nominated, and truly a highlight of my year.
**In November, I traveled twice to Duluth and once to Moorhead for work and then again to Fargo for Thanksgiving Day at Lacey and Adam’s place. I can’t remember the last time I was home for Thanksgiving. But no highlight reel would be complete without mentioning all the family time we were fortunate to have this past year. Thanksgiving with Mom, Dad, Lacey, Adam, Fischer & Selah, Christmases with Leah’s family, Leah’s grandma’s 90th birthday celebration/family reunion in South Dakota, lake time with Lacey, Adam, Mom and Dad, lake time with Leah’s aunt and uncle, drop-ins and visits from Mom, Leah’s family, and more, were all reminders of why living in Minnesota is so important. Although we couldn’t go to Las Vegas in November for a family reunion due to Election season and all, it was nice to see family on the regular.
**A final highlight I’ll mention is the Quilt of Valor ceremony that I got to experience with Dad at Thanksgiving. Big thanks to George and Denise for bringing our family together in that way. It was a very proud moment for me, and I’m sure for Dad as well.
Aura
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Simp
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Ick
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Rizz
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Aura 〰️ Simp 〰️ Ick 〰️ Rizz 〰️
Celibate Still Life
Art installation at Maison des Sauvageaux, circa 2016
1 Procrastination
2 Misery
3 CDs
4 Friday, 9pm
5 NYE Kisses
6 Rehearsal Space
7 Wall Art
8 Essentials
9 The Cupboard Where Dreams Die
10 Reservation for One
11 Bedside Manner
On this day: 12/14/2016
—La Colombe (Damen Ave, Chicago, IL)
I am enjoying this new Sunday morning routine. I have been waking up at 6am and riding Wolfy to Stan’s Donuts and thence to La Colombe for a coffee prior to leading the weekly 3RIDE2 adventure. This morning, the girl behind the counter at Stan’s <<CHECKS PHONE>> asked for my name, because she sees me there every Sunday. I’m trying to create routines that encourage fitness:
Monday morning recovery boots at Edge, coffee and working on my yoga class for that night.
Tuesday morning Edge plyometric workout
Saturday morning Bang Bang 3RUN2 crew run followed by yoga at Tula from 11 to 12:30
Sunday morning Stans, Colombe, 3RIDE2 <<CHECKS PHONE>>
How many minutes did I just lose there, looking at my device? Checking for hidden notifications? I’m addicted. Yesterday, my little Andorinha came home from the Turin Hospital for Children. She is beautiful. I named her after those beautiful Portuguese birdies and the even more lovely song about them sung by Amalia Rodrigues and Carminho <<CHECKS PHONE>>. We took our maiden flight together from Turin to Lifetime yesterday afternoon. She rides like a little dream. <<CHECKS PHONE>> It’s no wonder that I can never finish anything, can never write anything worthy if I am constantly being pulled from the present moment to see who LIKED my most recent post. What a waste. I miss writing so much <<CHECKS PHONE>> I think I’ve got a problem. What was happening in my life last year on this date? I wrote bad poetry. I wrote about how Tall Rob told me after yoga that he was chatting with another one of my regular attendees at the gym who told Tall Rob: “I love Josh’s classes. Josh is like a SOFT MOUNTAIN.” I loved that so much <<CHECKS PHONE>> Wednesday is the anniversary of my writing “We All” arguably the best, most rambling and schizophrenic poem I’ve penned to date. I’ll need to issue a special revision for the anniversary <<CHECKS PHONE>>. I got drunk on Dewars white label scotch and wrote for about three solid pages, of which I revised and edited to what I thought was the best lines of the bunch. In fact, while I’m thinking about it, I should <<CHECKS PHONE>> What I was going to say is: perhaps I should revise it now as I am thinking about it. I have the master version saved on Medium. I will perhaps make time this morning—while I’m in recovery boots—to further revise. <<CHECKS PHONE>> I can’t believe how much has changed in one year since writing that piece. Last year I was flying to Tampa for a pre-Christmas trip someplace warm. I was unemployed, or had actually just been hired as Operations Manager at WFMT. I feel like I am a more confident yoga teacher today and that I am in a better place emotionally, though still a long way from where <<CHECKS PHONE>> I hope to see myself.
CHECKS PHONE
<<>>
CHECKS PHONE <<>>
Andorinha
On this day: 12/7/2015
We all make mistakes, we all make friends, we all make a mess. We all clean it up.
Every so often, I’ll dip back into my Morning Pages to find an entry from this day in my history, and reproduce it here. On this particular day, I was flying from Chicago to Florida. Flying is often where I get most of my good writing done, because it offers so few distractions, comparativley. This entry directly sparked my poem “We All”.
Leaving today for Tampa, visiting V’s Mom and Charles there this week. It will be nice to get the hell out of Chicago for a few days of sun and beach. I’m going to do my best to enjoy the trip and not get pulled back into Chicago bullshit for a few days, at least.
Another rejection letter. This time from the SIXFOLD contest, in which a poem is rated against six others, through three rounds of voting by other poets. My “Leatherbacks” didn’t make it past Round 1, earning a score of 3.6 out of 6. Oh well…keep trying. [“The Leatherbacks” later titled “Prey” would eventually be published in Pest Control Issue 2, March 2021]
redemption
<——— Oliver Minnall, 2001Thinking about Brian Kennelly today, as I was telling V about my Navy days. I haven’t thought about him in years—an outrageous character—who roomed with Vincent Mak in “A” School. Mak would become one of my closest friends on the Vinson. Then there’s Oliver Minnall, Mark Howard, Lloyd Colgin, all ghosts from my past. Names with nothing else attached to them. How insane is that? I spent over a year with these guys, hanging out every day. We watched the towers fall together in real time on 9/11, and now all I retain is a faint recollection of their names. Some, not even that much: the hulking MM mechanic with the square, bald head, who I shared a bathroom with, who I was slightly terrified of, who drove me to downtown Charleston one night to party, where we got completely hammered on $5 Long Island Iced Teas, and on the way home I thought I was certainly going to piss myself, and he got into the bathroom first, and Minnall [my roommate] was playing Dreamcast—or whatever game system was en vogue at the time—at 2 in the morning. Or the 1980s movie marathon that I held in our room one weekend, people popping in and out at all times of the day. Jesus. It was another lifetime. Playing sand volleyball on a Sunday afternoon, going to the beach when I was in Prototype—which beach? I know it had a name—drunk on Smirnoff Ice and boogie boarding, and the strap of the thing getting caught between my thighs somehow as a fucking riptide pulled me out to sea, towards the pier. I surely thought I would die that day. Or the other time at the beach, covering myself in Coppertone Classic—essentially COOKING OIL—and falling asleep in the sun, getting burned so badly that my entire forehead erupted into a billion blisters and I looked like Freddy Krueger for two weeks. Or that blonde instructor at Prototype [Timothy Croak, RIP 8/29/2024] who was so goddamn cocky and hated everything and all of us and was the meanest 2nd Class Petty Officer I ever met in the six years I served.
How is it possible that all that exists in this INSTANT?
Staggering to think about, really. Everything goes. Nothing lasts—and we all act as if it really will last forever. Like we have an eternity to do the things we want, like we have all the money to do everything we want. Life is a short bus. Suddenly, all the stress about giving up a full-time job to explore yoga teacher training seems TRIVIAL. But isn’t everything trivial, extended out to a long enough timeline? The older I get, the more convinced I become that trying to make a thing last is the definition of futility, Nothing lasts. That is the only truth I know. Every day we wake up, we are infinitely different than we were the previous day. It’s impossible to remain the same, day in and day out. We are trapped inside these humyn bodies—which is such a relief, because at least we have that as an anchor point—the same face staring back at us from the looking glass each morning; something recognizable. I could wake up tomorrow an accountant living in a remote yurt in Mongolia, and the only thing that would surprise me is if I no longer recognized the face in the mirror.
This hippy, sitting kitty-corner from me has been in his stocking-feet since he sat down; plane still attached to the jetway, baggage still being tossed into the compartment below—stocking-footed. I have to laugh. It’s only a two-hour flight, brah.
Why am I terrified to write what is actually concerning me? You know why. People read over shoulders, that is why. I am a bad person, aren’t I?
No, I am not. This is life.
We all make mistakes, we all make friends, we all make a mess. We all clean it up. We all write. We all swipe left. We all pick our noses when nobody’s looking. We all cry. We all avoid those we don’t want to see. We all seek out those we want. We all drink scotch before noon. We all see our therapists daily. We all take our medicine. We all experience turbulence. We all get cancer. We all kill sheep ritualistically on the Autumnal Equinox. We all stab one another in dark alleyways for 20 cents and a bus pass.
We all sit in crowded airplanes in our stocking feet. We all sing. We all laugh. We all shoot heroin. We all soil ourselves. We’ve all been to Lisbon. We’ve all been to Reykjavik. We’ve all been to the laundromat. We’ve all run a marathon. We all are made of comets. We all are bloodsacks. We all speak to aliens. We all believe in Santa. We all turn our TV on, watch it for hours, and never learn a goddamn thing. We all cook eggs. We all cheat. We all lie. We all roast in the flames of a fire we all built. We all store our dryer lint in a sandwich baggie by the DVDs, so we can use it for kindling to start that fire. We all drink an entire bottle of bourbon by that fire when we should be at home with hubby. We all pet someone else’s kitty behind the ears. We all brag about it later to our friends, or anyone who’ll listen. We all glisten. We all glow. We all shine. We all swim. We all drown.
We all
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We all 〰️
We all believe the Olmecs were the best. We all burn at the stake. We all set the stakes too high. We all play ping pong with the neighbor boy. We all flunk algebra. We all write “poetry” when we’ve had a little too much to drink. We all eat far too much cheese. We all chew our food with our mouths hanging open. We all wish we were cabana boys. We all love fado. We all love Larry David. We all love Donald Trump. We all are gay. We all are Muslim. We all are salmon. We all are Kodiak bears. We all play the bass fiddle in folk-rock bands. We all read magazines when we wait in the lobby for our turn in the dentist’s chair. we all drive Vespas from the café to the lycée with our teeth chattering in the cold. We all watch our friendships die. We all watch our friends die. We all play the radio a little too loudly for our own good.
We all buy houses we can’t possibly afford. We all run up our credit card debt. We all have a 401k. We all get two weeks for vacation. We all sip mimosas on the beach in Cancún as the sun rises. We all black out. We all forget who we are. We all forget who we were. We all forget whomever we were supposed to be. We all regret. We all paint in the style of the modern man. We all get accepted to the Ivy League. We all make six figures. We all winter in Istanbul. We all watch airplanes fall from the sky. We all fly with the angels. We all smoke too much. We all have an app for that. We all Just Do It. We all Enjoy Responsibly. We all refresh our Facebook feeds. We all swim with sharks. We all hunt giraffes. We all know how to sling a sledgehammer. We all have a Hall of Champions. We all have won a Grammy. We all belong in Cooperstown. We all died on the Titanic. We all would love a Toblerone, if you’re offering. We all play Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” on repeat and cry ourselves to sleep. We all take hemlock when the time comes. We all write our memoirs prematurely. We all snuggle under the covers as we watch our lives slip away. We all hike the AT. We all re-enact the Battle of Bull Run. We all break down screaming on the floors of airports. We all blow our brains out on live TV. We all grunt. We all moan. We all laugh until our sides hurt. We all sing XMas Carols. We all have favorites. We all have enemies. We all have a hard time with it. We all hope for the best. We all prepare for the worst. We all wish we had more time.
We don’t.
Publications and Honors
ESSAYS
“Remember to Forget” — Slippery Elm 2024 (nominated for a Pushcart)
POETRY
“Blue-Collar Fugue” — Sobotka Literary Magazine issue 10
“Last Letter Home” — North Dakota Quarterly issue 90.3/4
“Mirror in Mirror” — Honorable mention in Hal Poetry Prize
“Stickball Cemetery” — Fish Anthology 2022 (Honorable mention in Fish Poetry Prize 2022, judged by Billy Collins)
“Prey” — Pest Control issue 2
“Nelson Cruz at 41: Pelotero, Astronaut” — Cobalt (finalist in Cobalt’s “Extra-Innings” Prize)
HYBRID
“A Lonely Undergrad Wanders into Gorilla Sushi on a Friday Night” — third place in Deanna Tulley Memorial Prize 2023
“Why Not, Minot?” — Finalist in Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing
November 2024 Recap!
A Pushcart Nomination! A poetry reading! A published essay! Work travel! And more!
A Pushcart Nomination! A poetry reading! A published essay! Work travel! And more!
If I knew then that I would end up spending my whole life behind a keyboard, I’d have gone outside to play.
Order your copy here: https://slipperyelm.findlay.edu/buy-a-copy/
Almost forgot that I recorded this music video at the beginning of the month as well. Check it out below or follow my YouTube channel.
On this day: 11/27-28/2002
Every so often, I’ll dip back into my Morning Pages to find an entry from this day in history, and reproduce it here. On these particular days, November 27th and 28th, 2002, I was checking in to the USS Carl Vinson for the first time.
11/27/2002: Woke up at 3am to check out of TPU [Transient Personnel Unit] San Diego. What a joke! It only took five minutes to check out and now we must wait hours before the bus comes to take us to the ship. I heard the USS Carl Vinson is due to pull into San Diego between 1300 and 1600 today. Bus takes us to a large warehouse where we wait. At about 1230, the Carl Vinson first comes into sight. As it approaches, I am absolutely dumbfounded at the size of the ship. We wait two-plus hours until they finally let all fifty of us new check-ins onboard. A lot of paperwork and finally they show me to my “pit” or bed. It is about six and a half feet long, three feet wide, and two feet between my mattress and the lower frame of the bunk above mine. There are two sliding blue curtains for privacy.
11/28/2002: Woke up at 0600. It’s Thanksgiving morning. Went to breakfast, which consisted of hard pancakes. Mustered with my division at 0730. We were released around 0900 to go to the flight deck as CVN-70 got underway. Stood atop as we transitioned out of the harbor. Quite a strange feeling to be that high off the water, watching the tiny kayaks below. The ship is so large that I don’t think I’ll ever see all of it. In a bit of a dilemma though, as I don’t have enough space for all my belongings and have had to sleep with my backpack crammed into my pit with me, restricted my already minimal space to sleep. Apparently, somebody else is using my locker, so I can’t put my things away until that is sorted. The ship begins to rock and it is becomes obvious that we have left the relatively calm harbor waters.
Wish I could call Mom and Dad and say Happy Thanksgiving, but I’ll wish it to them anyway. Slept for a long time during the day. Woke up at 11pm! They were serving Thanksgiving dinner for mid-rats (midnight rations), and since I slept through it earlier, I helped myself. There was turkey, ham, mashed potatoes and gravy. I was eating my mid-rats alone, missing home, and feeling lonely and sad. Someone came and sat next to me and asked me if I was okay. That was nice of them. I think I’ll like it here.
Eight Vehicle Pileup in C-flat Minor, Op. 17
Written at an all-night diner in Silverdale, WA. January 2, 2003
BMX Highway Foxtrot painted December, 2002
Gazing at the cloudless midnight canopy
as my sedan hugs the yellow line,
the grey jelly begins to spark
and stutter
and gyrate
and waltz to Stravinsky
and to Lenin
and to a cello concerto
composed and conducted by Castro.
My eyes suck into the back of my head
as the pangs of oboes
and gongs of jackhammers
fill the hall.
An old hag,
dripping in diamonds,
and fur
and resentment
rises, frowns, mutters, frothing,
stomping on the toes of the nobodies nearby.
Fidel scowls over his shoulder
as the orgasm crescendos—
blows continuously—from the stage,
blares obscenely
at whatever ear dare enter
within its piercing radius.
Like a pestering child with a secret,
the musicians pound on red plastic sand pails,
all the same size,
the same tone,
the same dull thud into thousand-dollar microphones:
THUD
T H U D
T H U D.
In perfect union.
Now the mirrored ball—
plump as Phobos, slow as saplings—
begins its long descent,
and the sound slaps off its surface as it spins,
eviscerating the ear
like a school of piranhas
attacks bloodied Bambi:
Relentlessly.
Mechanically.
And just before blackness falls,
I notice that my sedan isn’t being too friendly with that yellow line.
On this day: 11/20/2015
Every so often, I’ll dip back into my Morning Pages to find an entry from this day in history, and reproduce it here. On this particular day, 11/20/2015, I was drinking copious amounts of dark rum and listening to Tom Waits albums, while typing whatever came into my head. Here is that transcript.
A screaming skeleton of a squirrel squirms down a stick of nasty branches that, once upon a July, some summers ago, resembled an Ash Tree; an Ash Tray, today. Getting deeper, getting loster, lostest, flawstest, flautist. Sing! You scorpion, serenade me or shut your face and BEGONE! Do Not Feed the animals after Midnight. Not under any circumstances. Nor shall ye allow them to graze upon these pastures, unsupervised, lest they needs be shot betwixt the eyes. Cry yourself to an early grave, sob yourself into oblivion.
Scroll away, scroll away on that fucking device. Watch your life slip away. Why am I sitting at this godforsaken typewriter when I could be watching the TV set? Can’t I be the Cabana Boy? The Handsome Handyman? Write, you brute, or the whips are coming out for the Cabana Boys. It’s time time time. Time to go back again into the brass cage. You sickly little worm, you sicken me with your sticky green slime. Your snail trail smelling to high heaven. Is this #Real life? #IsThisRealLife? What? WHUT? Just put the fucking phone down, will you? You could write 10,000 words of nonsense each day if you can only put that fucking phone down. Flush it down.
“All the donuts have names like prostitutes”. I would give my left nut to write a line like that. GAWD. Where is that barefoot balladeer, with a voice like Sam Cooke, trimming his sails in a world sans snark? And how are you supposed to get your writing done when this dog needs pets? Stop opening drawers, stop scrolling, stop running, running, always running. Sit your ass in that chair and put your goddamn phone away. Why waste your time? None of this is going anywhere. Please, please, by all means, check to see if you collected any likes, loves, hearts, hugs, comments, favorites, kisses, emojis, thumbs-down, “WTF?”s in the past five minutes. We will wait…Ha! One like, indeed! Score!
Lets freshen that up for you “while you wait”. We will freshen you up in a real jamboree jiffee. Woman Pushing Scotch in Stroller: Google it. Why do you think you were not born to be tamed, like the screaming squirrel in the stick tree? And what is this nasty white shit I see drifting down past the windows? It had better be something that is delivering me a hot pizza or a winning Mega-Million ticket, or else it is entirely unwelcome round these parts.
In a world sans sadness, sans snark, sans sharks, sans Smack—wasn’t that a cereal? Smacks? Jelly Smacks? Honey Smacks? Nine times out of ten, dimes out of yen, slimes out of MEN, chimes out of pen, crimes out of Glenn?
There is something foul and fluffy floating down from clopping clueless clouds, clobbering clammy clapless clots clubbing their way to Clubanistan. Back to the brass cage, you little stinking shit-heeled Cabana Boy, you slippery shit, you. Where is my whiskey goddamn you?
Where is my lantern? Lantern? What is this? 1946? A lantern, for Pete’s sake? Who is Pete? Sipping, slipping, snipping sage cervesas, certainly, senselessly. Some screaming is certainly coming from down the hallway. I’m not sure how much screeching should be expectorated on such an occasion. You can’t hide from the screaming skeletal squirrel as he inches down the branches.
Whose panini is this, over here? Crushed and dismantled, with plenty of garlic and crickets added to the thing, thus ruining it, in flavor at least. It does, at minimum, bear a slight visual resemblance to a sammich. The american cheese slices pressed between rye crusts doesn’t CHALLENGE the PALLETTE. This is not the greatest sandwich ever. One star. *. If I could give it Zero stars, I would. After all, I mean, who leaves a whole, fresh panini unwrapped, still steaming, on a park bench anyway? And who wants to take my sheep for a spin in the pastures? I can pay $5.00 for the day of work. That amounts to $0.42 per hour of good, h’old fashioned walkin and workin, before he is whisked away to his pretty brass cage, where his scotch stroller sleeps soundly, folded up in the corner, collecting cobwebs, collating cumberbunds, correcting cokeheads, captured, crusted. No editing required or desired.
The Lavender Silk Shirt
Any minute now, I’d see her round, freckled face, and wavy, messy red hair, as she’d descend the steps. She would skip over to me wearing an oversized Guns N’ Roses t-shirt and ripped jeans, smelling like canned peaches and nicotine. We did it out in the open—never huddled discreetly under bleachers, and certainly not in the blind-darkened, cramped confines of a bedroom, hot and sticky before the parents got home from work: that was unimaginable at thirteen.
I was standing at our spot near the flagpole behind the Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton junior high school, which was just across the street from the apartment I shared with Mom and Lacey. Sarah was running a little later than usual. If she kept this up, I’d miss the start of Animaniacs. After a while, her best friend Misti emerged without Sarah and marched straight over to me. I scrunched my nose to inch my smeared glasses back up. She looked at my shoes, then wordlessly handing me a note, turned to walk away. I unfolded the page:
Hey Josh, it’s been fun, but we both know this isn’t working. Have a good life. xo Sarah.
I read it again.
And again.
I felt like I was riding the Gravitron at the Cass County Fair; centrifugal force pulling my guts into my spine. My eyes clouded with tears as I crossed the street towards home. Breathing hard, I climbed the steps to our cramped second-floor apartment and opened the door, dropped my bookbag onto the floor, sat on the corner of my waterbed and wept, reading the breakup note over and over as tears dripped onto the page, smearing, but not blunting Sarah’s sharp words. It wasn’t even four o’clock when I changed into my green and gold tiger-striped Zubaz and assumed a fetal position under the covers. I slid the note under my pillow and just lay there sobbing.
Mom got home from her undergrad classes at Moorhead State and was making the rounds. I heard her voice out in the living room, “Is your brother in his room?”
Lacey was munching Old Dutch sour cream and onion potato chips and watching Hey Dude on Nickelodeon. “I dunno,” crunch crunch.
Mom paused outside my bedroom, which was just across the hall from the one she shared with Lacey, and rapped softly on my door. “Buddy—?” She turned the knob and slowly pressed it open. “It’s so dang dark in here. Are you in bed already?” My back was to her as I tried to stifle my sobs. “Josh—honey, are you not feeling good?” I had no words, only anguish. Sorrow, like I’d never known before, had choked the voice out of me. Mom sat on the corner of the bed and touched my bony shoulder. “Are you gonna talk to me? Joshua Alan, what is wrong? Did somebody pick on you at school again?” I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Tears soaked my pillowcase as my body shook.
Lacey appeared at my door, cradling the chips in one arm and our five-month-old black and white short-haired kitten in the other. “Zeuser wants to say hi.” She placed him onto the bed, which made little splash sounds as he walked across it.
“Ha-uh, Lacey, that cat should not be on the waterbed. He’s gonna cut a hole in the mattress and then we’ll have a real mess on our hands.” Mom grabbed him and set him, mewling onto the floor. “Ok, well, I’m gonna go get dinner started.” She got up and lingered at my door for a few moments before closing it.
I cried myself to sleep…a knock at my door woke me. “Buddy, I’ve been calling for you, dinner is ready. Get up.”
“I’m not hungry Ma.” My voice was a rusted swing set.
“Well you gotta eat somethin’. You haven’t eaten all day.”
I closed my eyes again and tried to sleep but couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah. What had I done wrong? There was no sign that she was unhappy, just that horrible note.
We met a few months earlier at one of the monthly school dances. The weekend before that dance, Mom took me to Herberger’s at the Moorhead Center Mall to buy me what she called a decent shirt. I wanted to wear my heather grey DGF Rebels tee with my flannel, but she told me I needed to dress up for the dance. I didn’t know what that meant, but as we wandered around the boys’ clearance rack, I was drawn to a silk, lavender-colored, long-sleeve button down. I had never touched material so soft before. The fabric blossomed around the cuffs and the purple buttons gleamed with a mother-of-pearl sheen. Mom crossed her arms in front of her chest when she looked at the price tag, but she let me try it on. I emerged from the dressing room beaming in my huge round-framed glasses. Mom’s heart must have melted to see me smile, because she agreed to pay the exorbitant $29.99 plus tax (marked down from $50).
On the first Friday of the month, the DGF PTA turned the junior high gymnasium into a dance floor, decorated with black and silver balloons and streamers. I stood on the perimeter of the gym, my new lavender silk shirt tucked into my Lee jeans, bobbing my head to “Insane in the Brain”, the bass booming and echoing in the gym. When the DJ played “Epic” by Faith No More, the slow-dancing couples moved out of the way as a small group of headbanging long-haired kids—in torn denim and flannel—overtook the floor. My eye was immediately drawn to a petite girl with the longest red hair who was banging with the best of them. When the song ended, she looked over at me and smiled.
A few songs later, I grabbed a dixie cup of ginger ale and a handful of chips from the refreshment table and was on my way to take a seat on the bleachers, when I got shoved from behind. My chips and ginger ale spilled onto the floor. “Nice silk shirt, puss.” I turned around and looked up to see Travis Motschenbacher, who was wearing a Big Johnson t-shirt tucked into his Girbaud jeans. Travis was in my PE class. He had a build like Superman and a massive tuft of chest hair, which was the envy of all the seventh-grade boys. When I bent over to pick up the mess I made on the floor, he pulled the shirt-tail out of the back of my pants. “Does your mama know you’re wearin’ her blouse?”
Just as I was about to tell Travis to take a long walk off a short pier, the redhead emerged from the crowd and grabbed my hand: “Hey, you wanna dance?”
My heart sprang. “Mmhmm” I nodded as Travis strode off to pick on some other poor sap.
She smiled at me again, tucking a wavy red curl behind her ear, and led me out to the floor. Disco lights skittered across the waxed hardwood as I felt the heat and smelled the BO of my pimpled classmates, pressing up against one another. She wrapped her arms around the back of my neck and I grabbed her narrow hips as we swayed side to side. She took my wrists with her hands, and encircling them around her low back, pulled me closer. She gazed up at me and smiled. Her teeth were lovely: the two top incisors were pushed back just a hint from her eye-teeth, giving her a steamy vampiric glow. My teeth were crooked and yellow, so I smiled with my lips only. I had no clue how to dance. Had no sense of rhythm. She led. Her back was strong and slender and she moved with purpose, with direction. Whitney Houston was singing “Iiiiiiii—will always, love you…” and during the sax solo, Sarah pressed her lips to mine. I could feel the tip of her tongue entering my mouth — almost apologetically at first, but then, as if she was standing on the principal’s desk in muddy Doc Martens, screaming “welcome to the jungle!” I had never given a thought to how a first kiss should feel or when it would happen, but suddenly, Sarah was kissing me. Little sparks started to swirl and blister behind the backs of my eyelids. Our lips locked until the song ended, and then she was waving goodbye as she grabbed her coat and got into her mom’s truck.
Monday morning, passing her in the hallway, she handed me a folded piece of notebook paper, Josh ❤️ scrawled on the front. I opened it: I can’t stop thinking about that kiss. Meet me by the flagpole after school. xoxo Sarah
She came outside, strolled right over to me, wrapped her arms around my neck like she did on the dance floor, and we kissed—long and hard.
That was our whole relationship. Dancing during slow songs. Kissing until the chaperones split us up. Passing little love notes in the hallways whenever we saw each other, and kissing after school. Now it was over though, and so was my life.
When I woke up the next day, I was still in a fetal position. Hoping it was all a nightmare, I reached under my pillow and found the note. I read it and started crying again. Mom swung open the door, “You’re not dressed! Are you planning to play hooky?” I rolled over to look at her before rolling back onto my side and closing my eyes. She slammed the door and I heard her on the phone, telling the school secretary that I was out sick. As soon as I heard the door close, I tuned my clock radio to Y94. “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men was playing through the static, which made me cry harder.
I lay there most of the day, slow jams simmering on the radio in the background. Crying until I had no tears left to spill.
I kept turning over reasons Sarah would do this. Maybe this was like that time with Anthony.
A few months before I met Sarah, Anthony from Social Studies invited me over to his place to look at his stepdad’s Hustlers. I didn’t really know Anthony, and didn’t want to go, but none of my other classmates had ever invited me to their homes, so I figured I’d make a friend. We sat on his couch and listened to his Wreckx-n-Effect tape, and then he told me to grab the Hustler, which his dad kept under the cushion of his Lay-Z-Boy. When I turned back around—without a magazine, because there wasn’t one—Anthony was pointing a .357 at my forehead and screaming “Get on the fucking floor! Give me your money, motherfucker!”
I nearly shat myself and got onto his crusty carpeting as quickly as I could, fingers interlaced behind my head, like I’d seen the perps do on COPS. I started crying, “I don’t have any allowance, please Anthony, I’ve only got some change in my pocket, please, please, don’t do it!”
Anthony started laughing maniacally. “Get up, man. Get up. I was fucking joking, man. I wasn’t going to rob you, bro, haha. It was a joke.” He buried his stepdad’s gun in the cushions of the couch and patted me on the chest. We watched an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos and then I walked home, never breathing a word of that joke to mom.
Maybe Sarah’s note was just a joke.
Mid-afternoon, Lace got home from school, singing “Joshy! I’ve got your homework.” She came into my room, munching Cheetos, and tossed my assignments onto the bed, then skipped back to the living room to watch TV. I took a peek at the pile of homework, then swiped it onto the floor with the back of a forearm. Go to hell, Mrs. Anderson: what can a dissected pig brain teach me about loss? Give me a break, Mr. Vossler; unless your dovetail joint can mend a broken heart, I have no use for it.
I got out of bed to retrieve the cordless phone, squinting as the streaming sunlight stabbed my eyes. I locked the bathroom door behind me and sat on the toilet, pressing Sarah’s digits into the phone—for the first time, I realized. “Hello?” an adult woman’s voice answered. Her mom? An older sister? I didn’t know anything about her family.
I had no idea what I was going to say to Sarah. “Take me back?” “I’m drowning on tears?” Maybe she was waiting for me by the flagpole right now, and it was all just a misunderstanding. “Hi, is Sarah there?”
“Who’s calling?”
“This is Joshua.”
“Sasha?”
“No, Joshua—”
Sarah’s mom/sister placed her hand over the receiver and shouted “Sarah, do you know a little girl named Sasha?…” Silence, then a dial tone.
I re-dialed the number. The same voice answered. “Hello? Uh Sasha, yes, she’s…not home from school yet, but I’ll let her know you called.” Dial tone.
Sarah had cracked open my ribcage with her painted black fingernails, and like the metalhead she was, devoured my entrails over a nasty, wailing, Slash guitar solo.
Mom got home from class and marched straight to my room. “Still in bed?” silence “Maybe I’ll just call your father and tell him that you won’t talk to me.” I couldn’t look at her. She wouldn’t understand. I just pulled the comforter over my head. “Have you eaten today?” silence “You better pick up that homework or Zeus is going to use it for a litter box.” silence
The second night was a carbon copy of the first. I continued rotting in my bed, rooting around in stale pajamas, re-reading the note.
The following morning, Mom tried to pry me out of bed again, but I still refused to move, refused to speak. She popped her head into my room on her way to classes. “I’m calling you out sick one more day, but this is really it. If you’re not out of that bed by the time I get home, I’m gonna take you to the emergency room, buster. Is that what you want? Get the doctors to poke and prod you? Eat something and clean the litter box as long as you’re not doing anything constructive.”
I wondered what Sarah would think of me missing school two days in a row. Did she care? Did she even notice? My ears burned as I imagined her and her headbanger friends roasting me over lunch, laughing so hard that Jolt cola sprayed out of their noses. Sarah would probably be making out with some other boy after school today. Maybe Ted Mars: he was not only taller and better looking than me, but he played drums in Doomslayer and was, like Sarah, a grade older than me. They’d be graduating middle school in a few weeks and going off to DGF High School, which was miles away in Glyndon. Happily ever after.
I leaped out of bed, flung open my closet door and pulled my lavender silk shirt so hard that it snapped the cheap plastic hanger. I sniffed the front of the shirt, hoping I could catch a whiff of Sarah, from the last time she pressed her cheek to me. Nothing. It smelled like me, like my clothes. I sat back on the edge of my bed and buried my tears in the shirt. I felt like a vase—that once held a fragrant bouquet of wildflowers—now empty, cracked, and tossed into a dumpster. My thread to Sarah was a tenuous one, to be sure, but now nothing remained, save a wrinkled, tear-smudged break-up note. I pulled the note from under my pillow one last time, re-read the words which had been indelibly etched into memory and tore the page into funeral confetti.
I didn’t even notice Mom standing in the doorframe of my bedroom, her shoulder slouching under the weight of her bookbag.
“Mom—” I dried my eyes with the back of my hand, “how long have you been standing there?”
“You’re gonna stain that shirt.” I tossed it onto the floor and expelled a tear-shattered shudder. She joined me on the padded railing of my waterbed. “Buddy, you know you can talk to me about anything dontcha?” She angled her head to make eye contact with me, put her hand under my quivering chin. “I’m your mother.” I nodded my head and sniffled. She put her arms around me and hugged me tight, gently patting my back like she would have done countless times when I was an infant. “What’s her name?”
I stiffened.
“This little redheaded gal I saw you kissing across the street; did she do this to you?”
“…Sarah.” I was gobsmacked. How long had she known?
“Ta heck with this Sarah. It’s her loss. Joshua, I know you don’t wanna hear this now, and you prob’ly won’t believe me, but there will be other Sarahs down the road. You are gonna meet so many girls, boys, whatever, in your life and some are gonna hurt ya, and some you might hurt.”
She was right. I didn’t believe it. Didn’t want to. I shook my head.
“It’s true. But they’ll all become a piece of you: the good and the not-so-good. Though they may never meet in real life, they’ll live side-by-side in your heart.” She interlaced her arthritic fingers to show me.
I turned my head to see Zeus curled up and purring on my lavender silk shirt.
Mom held onto my narrow shoulders and looked at me through my smeared glasses. “But ya can’t give up. We’ve just gotta keep going. Ta heck with this Sarah. It’s her loss. Now, let’s get you some mac n cheese, huh? You’re about to blow away in a stiff breeze.”
I nodded and followed Mom to the kitchen.
If Beethoven Owned an iPhone
his symphonies would number not 9, but 2
(perhaps 2 ½, leaving one
“Unfinished” like Bruckner did).
He would check his Twitter mentions
after every performance, scroll
the BBC Music app with each album dropped.
Ghost vibrations would leave incomplete
his Opus 70 Ghost Trio.
Fretting about his branding,
he’d compose and orchestrate his LinkedIn bio.
If his Heiligenstadt Testament
were leaked to Buzzfeed, he’d need to release
a PR video on YouTube,
sit down with Terry Gross,
post pics of his semicolon tattoo.
Conducting his Triple Concerto from the piano,
he might butt-dial that Soprano
he collabed with once, six years ago.
He would totes tote his Zelfie-Schtüken
on his daily walks around @RathausPark.
#NeverNotComposing
He would force his niece
to post TikToks of herself flossing
to his latest mixtape.
On death’s stoop, he’d doomscroll
in a darkened room, puffy undereyes,
shock of iconic hair cast in a sallow blue glow,
pressing the speaker end to his deaf ear,
volume full, feeling fomo
for his protégé’s Première.
#yolo
Marilyn Frankie Blue Eyes California,
too beefy to cram into a single poem
too beefy to cram
into a single poem,
you keep it all
to yourself: these hills,
this desert, this ocean
of need. You invented FOMO;
perfected it, you punchy wretch.
You first and final
vestige of Want,
The Omega / The Alpha /
The Alameda / The Mega /
the weight of your celebrity
dead sinking, sucking through
the silt, tilting the West Coast
into the churning deep.
Sweet Southwest, these San Jacintos
snarl, threaten to roll
you up or under,
to choke you with granite
countertops consume you,
drown you in LA’s flood,
Kubrick’s Shining elevators,
an El Niño of blood.
Marilyn Frankie Blue Balls California,
fatal destination of gold diggers
and punks and prawns,
all seafoam and bubblegum
and white.
Lazer-bleached teeth,
photoshopped, propped
in the Death Valley sun for forty years
white.
Land of cloudless skies and Botox tits,
thundering into your left eardrum
like Saint Paul’s Helter Skelter bass:
a stiff pecker seeking
any warm landing place.
Throwing up, throttling under,
swallowing the whole fucking globe.
Q&A with Mike Holmes
RIP Mike
Mike Holmes is one of perhaps two people (the other being Micah Scott) who I would consider the Godfathers of the Minot Punk Scene. Mike and Micah both sang and played guitar in the local band that had the single greatest impact on me in those years, JESUS. Mike also authored the first zine I ever read, Life is Shit and I’m Planting a Garden. Beyond his writings, his energy on stage, and his passion for all things punk, there was a side of Mike Holmes that I wasn’t aware of at the time: he was responsible for bringing the first punk shows to Minot, and for cultivating the Minot Collective Cultural Centre (MC3) scene that was blossoming when I joined in the spring of 1994.
Mike grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. There, he got involved in the DIY punk scene and straightedge culture while attending high school in Wheaton and Sycamore, IL. A few weeks after graduating from high school, Mike joined the Air Force. As he explained it to me, he and his dad had some deep discussions about the future. “Dad thought the military would be a good idea for me.” So when his dad passed away of a heart attack at the start of Mike’s senior year, Mike decided to enlist in the US Air Force — at least in part, “because I thought it was something my old man would have wanted me to do.”
When we meet over video conference, in August of 2022, I am a little thrown by Mike’s voice, which is deeper than I remember and gravelly. As I learn later in the interview, his vocal chords are decimated from years of screaming in hardcore punk bands. “I couldn’t sing for a band now if I wanted to,” he tells me, with a note of remorse. Our two-hour-long conversation is punctuated by loud laughter [which I’ll signify with 🎸]. Mike is a barber in North Carolina. He has a dark beard and horn-rimmed bifocals. When he gestures with his hands or adjusts the straps of his suspenders, as he does often, I notice that his fingernails are painted fire engine red.
INTERVIEWER: I didn’t realize that you were in the Air Force. Is that how you ended up in Minot?
HOLMES: Right, so after basic training, I was in Colorado for technical school, and when my orders came up the guy says to me: “Holmes, I don’t know who you pissed off already, but you have orders for Minot.” And I was like, What’s a Minot? 🎸 I don’t think I fully realized what “a Minot” was until I was getting off the plane. I flew there from O’Hare — one of the busiest airports in the world — and I landed at an airport that had one gate and where they put your luggage through a hole in the wall. It was just like, Fuck, man. It was the first time I was ever on a plane where they wheeled the stairs up to you. 🎸 Like, did I just land on Fantasy Island or some shit? So then an Airman picks me up and it’s late at night and we’re driving from the airport to the base, and he asks me if I’m hungry, and I said, yeah is there a Taco Bell around? And he answers, “Well, there’s a Taco John’s…” And I was like, Ah, Fuck! 🎸 It’s gonna be a long couple of years! 🎸 Because Taco Bell was a priority in my life then, as it is now [pauses to take a prolonged sip from a plastic Taco Bell to-go cup]. And then, as we’re driving to base I saw a fucking tumbleweed roll across the highway. And I was like, Fuck! I always thought tumbleweeds were just like quicksand or anvils dropping on your head, just like a trope that only exists in cartoons, but no, there was no Taco Bell, but they got tumbleweeds.
This was ’90 — ’91, so not only were we years away from the internet, but cable TV hadn’t even penetrated Minot yet! And I’m not picking on Minot at all when I talk about some of this stuff, but because of that, it took a while for culture to transmit from city to city back then. In a lot of ways, like the way that people dressed, and the hairstyles, and the music they listened to… you just felt that something was a little off. Minot really felt like a different place than I had ever been before. Which is something that I think is completely lost in America these days, as you go from one town to the next you know you’re going to find the same stores and the same experiences.
INTERVIEWER: What was the scene like when you arrived there?
HOLMES: There wasn’t a scene. Minot had never had a punk moment. Minot had never had a punk show. Minot never had a punk band. Minot had NIXON PUPILS, and as beloved as they were, they were a power pop trio. Like that was something else. Minot was the last punk rock scene. I really think that in America, it was the last punk rock scene of note to be founded. Of cities that were able to support a punk rock scene, Minot was the last to get one.
People don’t really understand what an island Minot was, you know. Where I grew up [Sycamore, IL] was kind of an island too. It was out in the middle of the cornfields, but it was an island that was only an hour away from Chicago. Minot was a fucking island. It was a town of 30,000 people and the next biggest town was Max [population: 300] 🎸 It was just a little blip in the middle of fucking nothing. And so why would it have a punk rock scene? It would be ridiculous for Minot to have a punk rock scene.
photo by Brent Braniff
INTERVIEWER: Then for you, coming out of that thriving Chicago scene to go to this town in the middle of nowhere with no scene, how did you cope?
HOLMES: It sucked. For my first nine months or so, I was hanging out with Airmen, going cruising, and listening to Bell Biv DeVoe. It did not nourish my soul. But what did nourish my soul is that I spent a lot of time writing to bands, who had listed their contact information in Maximum RocknRoll [punk subculture magazine founded in 1982]. And some of them wrote back, notably, KRUPTED PEASANT FARMERZ who I ended up becoming pen-pals with for quite a while. These bands would share other bands’ info with me and I started a real correspondence with many bands, labels, and distributors in that way. And then I met some kids on base. I think Dan Davis might have been one of them. Danny was a dependent, and we got to talking and he told me there was this kid downtown that I should meet, because he liked aggressive, primitive punk rock and he didn’t do drugs, and didn’t drink. So I told Danny I’d love to meet him, so that’s how I met Micah.
Micah and I, you know, we just fell in together immediately. I would go crash on his couch at his mom’s place, we’d go skateboarding, we’d listen to music, watch Kids in the Hall; we were just goofy kids hanging out, driving a hundred miles to Bismarck to get Taco Bell. 🎸 I had this book called Banned in DC, and it was a photo book of Washington, DC punk bands from, ’79 to ’85 — an amazing era. All these pictures of BAD BRAINS and MINOR THREAT and just the whole nine yards. Well, Micah and I used to pour over that book. Like just sit there on the floor with it, you know the binding is broke to shit because we’ve just got it flat. Just reading everything. Looking at the way people were dressing, looking at the descriptions of what happened at the door, we were just obsessed with it.
So Micah and I used to walk around downtown and press our faces against the glass of empty storefronts, dreaming about finding a place to have shows. There was a basement that was vacant and I called the landlord and asked if we could rent it out just for one night, and he agreed. Then I got in touch with this band out of Chicago called GEAR who played at the very first real punk show I ever went to. So it was a big deal for me to get them on the bill. I asked them if they would play a show here and they were into it. They weren’t on tour or anything, but they made the trip all the way to Minot, just to play that one show. They were like these guys in North Dakota want us to play, okay let’s go to North Dakota! So we did the GEAR show and NOBODY’S CHILDREN and CHEESE were the openers. But before GEAR could get on stage, we got shut down! The cops came around and said we needed to have security at any “dance” in the state of North Dakota. Even though this was not a “hop” by any means there was a band onstage, and by state law, a public performance by a band is considered a dance. So I felt terrible, because GEAR drove all that way — and it’s like a 15-hour drive — for that one show. A lot of people started to filter away but there were a group of us congregating on the sidewalk. And then the cop — in the first of what would frankly be many bro-moves from the Minot cops — was like, “You know, at this point, you’ve rented the place. You could have a ‘private party,’ and and we wouldn’t care, as long as there aren’t any noise complaints.” So the rest of the people went back downstairs and GEAR played for them. And they were the first out-of-town band to ever play at a punk show in Minot.
So after that, to be safe, we were hiring security for every show — and there were a lot of shows where security was paid more than any of the bands. I’ll say though, the fact that we could afford to pay rent and a couple hundred bucks to security, and still give the bands a little something, off the door sales — that’s pretty damn good. That’s better than a lot of punk scenes. Most of the out-of-town bands were happy if they could crash on someone’s floor and come away with enough gas money to get to the next town. None of them gave a shit if they got paid, and I certainly wasn’t making any money off of it. But I digress, so we’re paying all this money to security, and after a while — I can’t remember how long — we were talking to a cop who would come around during the shows, and he mentioned to us that while you had to have security at all public dances, private membership clubs don’t need to have security. So Micah and I looked at each other and we were like, Oh? We got you. Now, he didn’t come out and say ‘here’s how to scam the system’. We put it together, you know, but he was clearly aiming us in that direction, which again, was a cool instance of a Minot cop being a bro. I think they were getting tired of having to talk to us or whatever. So that’s when we started with the $1 annual membership dues 🎸.
INTERVIEWER: Did it take a while for the word to spread and the scene to grow there?
HOLMES: Surprisingly, no. NOBODY’S CHILDREN already had quite a following, so a lot of those kids rolled in right away or told their friends about it. We had a big scene. It’s wild that we could get 50–100 local kids to come to a show, and we had that two or three times a week at the height of it. You know, that’s hard to do in Chicago, so to do it in Minot regularly is crazy. And the same kids came out to every show, and they were cool. They were enjoying what was going on. The only time I ever heard of any friction was when JESUS was on tour in ’94. This band came through, I can’t remember who they were. But someone in the band made fun of a developmentally disabled person on the street, and kids weren’t having it. And again, this is ’94 so, not the ‘woke’ culture of today, but yeah they really hated that band and they told them off. They weren’t gonna let some punk band take the piss out of their locals. “You don’t come to our town and talk that kind of shit. We run a positive organization around here.” That was great.
We didn’t really know what we were doing. We were building the Minot punk scene as we believed every punk scene was run. Apart from my experiences in high school, we’d never been to other cities to see how scenes interacted between bands and promoters and stuff like that. We had only read in zines and books about the way that you should behave and treat one another, and we were just emulating that. There’s another interesting thing too, about Minot, and it’s something that I’m proud of, because I think that a lot of punk scenes take on characteristics of their founders, who instill certain values. I don’t think you can really find people who would say that Micah or I ever preached about straightedge or anything like that. The fact is, that people respected the Centre and the shows that we were doing and what was happening enough that they recognized that drugs and alcohol were not a part of what we were doing. And we never once had an issue with drugs or alcohol at a show. Never. Never once had an issue with a fight at a show. The scene was never plagued by vandalism. It just, it didn’t happen, like at all. We were out there picking up trash on the sidewalks in front of the Centre, because we didn’t want to shit where we ate. We were always cognizant of people looking at us and wondering what was going on. It just folded in really well that we wanted to show people that we weren’t about that life. That we weren’t destructive. That we can be a little weird and listen to a bunch of loud music but that we were not up to anything nefarious. Like I’m really fucking happy that that became the dominant mode of that scene because so many other scenes have been destroyed from within by those kind of toxic behaviors.
INTERVIEWER: I just want to acknowledge that I could not be who I am today without your presence in that scene. And I’ve heard that again and again from the people I’ve talked to in this project: they don’t know where they’d be if not for the MC3. Do you want to comment on the impact you had there?
HOLMES: Man, I get weird feelings about this. It’s difficult to walk a line between acknowledging the direct, massive support from Micah, Sarah [Micah’s then-wife] and from the scene at large. But at the same time, I feel a very paternalistic impulse in some ways towards the Minot scene, because I did put on the first shows there. I will say that it makes me really fucking proud when I hear about people who have been positively impacted by it. I don’t want to come off as arrogant about it but at the same time, I don’t want to bring some bullshit false modesty, because goddamnit, we did it. It makes me really fucking happy to hear about people who did something good after this, because, you know, and maybe this is me more than others, but you feel like a fucking failure a lot, or that you haven’t done anything with your life, or that you’re fucking useless. You know, sometimes you can look back at something you did in the past and go, Goddamn, that was really fucking cool. You’re looking back at that kid you once were and going, Fuck man, you really had it going on! That’s dope.
photo by Brent Braniff