Scene with sons at the dinner table
April is National Poetry Month! I aim to post a poem each weekday in celebration of the form. Some old, some new, some published, some never-before-seen.
As I mentioned in a previous post, poetry is everywhere. As I mentioned in another previous post, I am a childless pug-papa, but I have three nephews and two nieces, ranging in age from 3 to 24. I am grateful that over the past few years, I am proximally closer to my parents and to one of my sisters and her family. On one of my recent trips to visit them, I witnessed what is described in the poem below. A brief moment, but a moment that made my heart melt. A moment of love—in as much as men in our society can and do show love.
The original title for this poem was “My nephew feeds a cucumber slice to his grandpa” but it was too convoluted, too hard to follow. In revision, I simplified it by changing the name of my nephew and adjusting the relationship of the speaker (poet’s voice) as the father—observing the actions of the generation before him and the generation after him.
This is also one of my recent favorites, never before published online or elsewhere, but a poem which I read at my first-ever poetry reading at the Cannon Falls VFW last autumn.
Scene with sons at the dinner table After his seventh or eighth shake of salt onto the cucumber medallions which I have laid before my boy, I plead with Grayson not to eat them. Too much salt is like, really bad for you, bud. His eyes flip, moan, tackle mine: Conor McGregor hammerfisting Dr Phil. I think of my co-worker Bob, my age, and on a mandatory low sodium diet, courtesy of his cardiologist. I think of Grampa, an eighth-grade grad, who as a farmboy during the Depression, ate lard sandwiches for supper— that porky paste under his French tongue— and succumbed to his second heart attack. I think of Dad, aged 79, whose open-heart surgery and twice-grafted aortic aneurysms haven’t slowed the pace at which he cooks and consumes pot roast, meatloaf, bacon-wrapped bacon; who, for as long as I can recall has sprinkled salt into cans of Hamm’s, canned ham, tomatoes, flesh of watermelon. And Grayson, sitting in his usual place at Dad’s elbow looks up at him, laughter boiling in the teapots of his eyes, as he dresses his dinner in a crystalline sweater. Dad, distracting him with the guillotine chokehold flashing from his forty-inch console TV, taps the cucumber slice once, like an ashy cigarette, against the lip of Grayson’s Darth Vader dinner plate, and eats it himself.
March 2025 Recap!
‘March’ is no one's favorite word…has no comments yet, and is not a valid Scrabble word.
—from my new favorite website, Wordnik!
The first quarter of 2025 is in our rear-view, dear reader. True to form, our upper midwest March oscillated between blizzards and sunny 60-degree days. While one can never be too sure how the weather will change, I took a chance and drove up to Fargo the first weekend of the month, to celebrate the birthdays of my Mom and brother-in-law, Adam.
Mom and me early 1980. Seated left to right, Mom’s Grandpa Ed and Grandma Edna McGough, and her Grandpa Arthur Lemke (whose wife Sadie passed away mere hours before my birth on 1/7).
Dad and buddy Liberty Rose Sauvageau (aka Libbens)
As I’ve been researching and writing about family history lately, Mom shared several pictures and files that she’s collected over the years. Of particular note was a series of articles from the Seattle Star (dated April through September, 1945), detailing the shocking sexual assault and murder of my Grandma Dorothy’s 5-year-old cousin Irma Irene McGough.
from the April 27, 1945 Seattle Star. Grandma’s Uncle James McGough at right
Grandma’s cousin Irma Irene McGough, with her mother, Beulah May Simmons
In going through some old pictures, we also came across an article, which very well may be the genesis of my lifelong desire to write. From the Winter 1983 edition of North Dakota Bowhunters Association quarterly publication is a several-thousand word essay headlined “Manitoba Black, Our Way” — penned by my dad. An excerpt:
“With a single movement, Scott [Lang, Dad’s friend] drew and released a 2117 Gamegetter tipped with a four-bladed Satellite. The [bear] lurched with all the strength she could command, ran a short 60 yards and died peacefully in flight…We were awestruck at the beauty of this fallen animal: it happened so quickly and now it was over. We carefully dressed her with the reverence fitting a forest queen…”
Dad with his “Manitoba Black”
As a boy of 6 or 7, I remember feeling spellbound by this article. My parents encouraged reading from a young age: Mom would regularly take Lacey and me to storytime at the Lisbon Public Library, and Dad would read to us before bed. But seeing my father’s name in a print byline led to the youthful realization of the accessibility, and the potential reach of writing. I was happy to see that Mom and Dad had saved this article, tucked away in a musty photo bin in their garage.
Of course, one of the nicer niceties of living a few hours’ drive to the F-M Valley is getting to hang with my nephew Fischer and niece Selah. A few months ago, as Fischer and I were bonding about baseball cards, I gifted him one of my favorites: a 1988 Topps Tom Lawless card (which, great name, btw). It was a favorite because the 8-year-old me had cut out Tom’s face and replaced it with my own 4th grade school pic.
Well, as Fischer and I were looking through his cards, he handed one to me:
Obviously my heart melted. He told me to keep it, and I almost did, but thinking better of it, asked him to hang onto the card to give to his nephew one day.
Just as I was saying my goodbyes, Selah (age 3.5) came out wearing a beautiful sequined gown, and the morning sunlight streaming into the living room was too good to pass up:
Leah, Churro, and I flew to Arizona for a few days, though our trip was shortened somewhat due to an 8” snow dump in the Twin Cities. We got to see Leah’s Dad and Stepmom’s winter place in Gilbert, hiked a bit, ran (20 miles for her, 15 for me) in the area’s first rainstorm in six months, and spent a half day at the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale. It felt great to get a little sunshine for a few days there.
Leah and I on a hike in Scottsdale (photo by Mike Eggers)
Back at work, I got to engineer the live Before Bach’s Birthday Bash broadcast on YourClassical MPR. You can hear the broadcast in its entirety on the web. As this is Blue Collar Fugue, the March Fugue of the Month is JS Bach’s Fugue in C Major, performed by Samuel Backman here (at 47:55). It also gave me a chance to wear my “I’ll be Bach” Terminator mash-up sweatshirt.
I’ve been reading more this month, and I’d like to highlight a few of my favorites:
I can’t quit thinking about this beautiful essay “Make Room for Space” (not only because Alysha is a dear friend). Read it, and then read it again. Follow/Subscribe to her Substack. You will not be disappointed.
As March is the “5-year Anniversary of Covid” (as if that’s something we’re supposed to celebrate) I re-read this poignant essay by Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, about one of the many tragedies that unfolded in those early days of the pandemic.
A dark, lyric essay by poet Tony Hoagland from the Winter 2019-2020 Ploughshares—“Bent Arrows: On Anticipation of My Approaching Disappearance.”
Low: Notes on Trash & Art by Jaydra Johnson, which I immediately ordered upon hearing Johnson’s interview with Brendan O’Meara on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast while out for a long run.
A lovely zine titled “Here’s to the Land: The NC State Toast Fanzine” by Erin J. Watson, from the Zine-A-Month Patreon
I took an informative two-hour workshop titled “Shaping Family History into Compelling Stories” by fellow Substacker Annette Gendler.
And I did some writing/revising/editing as well, adding the following pieces to my Substack and here:
A poem questioning the pursuit of “success,” starring Ariana Grande and a starling
A journal entry from March 2017, one month before Leah and I started dating
A piece inspired by a spreadsheet I found from the Pine City (MN) Press
A poem I wrote in 2nd grade, which was published in our school-wide chapbook. Kudos to the North Dakota Public School system, circa 1988, and to my Mom for holding onto everything I’ve ever written. I’ll leave you with that poem, which TBH might be one of the better poems I’ve written in 35 years:
Recent Deaths of Note from Nelson’s Notable Deaths Compendium
Volume IV (excerpt: La—Lu)*
Lambert, Mrs L. F. — heart attack, butter maker, 1937 Larson, Edwin — son of Carrie and O. P., tuberculosis, gassed in France, 1934 Lawrence, Elizabeth — lynched for reprimanding white children who threw stones at her, 1933 Lee, Pavlo “Pasha” — actor, killed defending Kyiv from Russian offensive, 2022 Leinonen, Andrew — shot dead at Pulse nightclub massacre, 2016 Lloyd, Dee — aged 17, texting while driving, 2019 Logan, Andrew — stranger, suicide by train, 1932 Logan, Jessica — aged 18, suicide by cyberbullying, 2008 Long, Wm. H. — Lutheran minister, suicide by carbolic acid, 1935 Loughran, Cara Marie — aged 14, murdered by school shooter, 2018 Luehmann, Henrietta Schultz — aged 21, stove explosion, 1938 Luehmann, Geraldine — aged 16 months, stove explosion, 1938 Lueth, Betty Hawkinson — aged 15, suicide by AI Chatbot, 2025
*We have two individuals to thank for this file: Marge Swinton who compiled it, and Nora O’Hearn who entered all the data into the computer. Both jobs were incredible tasks.
Last Letter Home
A poem, discovered in an unlikely place.
In 2022, I received an ancient record from my supervisor, Mike. “This is a personal favor for a friend,” he said. I held the yellowed wax and paper disc by the edges and read the name on the label: SEAMAN GEORGE S—
I looked at Mike with fascination. What is this?
“It’s a letter, on record, from this young sailor to his family, before he shipped out in the Pacific theater during World War II. He never made it home.” Mike paused and looked at me. “Most of his family is gone now too, but this friend of mine is a relative and he’d love to hear it.”
As a Navy veteran myself, and in my current capacity as an audio engineer, I was eager to take this project on. The process of transcription was an arduous one. The record was so old and warped that it was very difficult to discern what was said. I digitized it and then set about “cleaning” the audio through various audio restoration software. The result was good, but it was no magic wand. It was still very difficult to hear what SN George S— had to say.
[Actual audio from this digitization of the record]
So I set about creating a transcript of what I could make out. If the family of our sailor was unable to hear all of the words, at least I could make my best effort at writing what I heard. Again, this was a painstaking process of listening, rewinding, scrubbing the audio. As I slowly re-created the transcript, I started to see, in the repetition, in the slow choosing of words, a kind of poetry emerging. Not that this sailor was a poet (for all I know he may have been), but the way this 70-year-old audio was conducting through my ears, to my brain, and out my pen, was a transliterative process of sorts.
Finally, after weeks of cobbling together the cleanest version of the audio and my transcript to deliver to Mike, I started forming a poem from the record. Utilizing the repetition of the transcription, utilizing the space and the thought and the imagination that I needed to access what was being said, this piece began to emerge.
I call it Last Letter Home, and it was published in North Dakota Quarterly Volume 90 Issue 3/4.
[My reading of the poem, if you prefer]
Like Playing Your Life Savings on Pull-Tabs
I’ve been waiting
so long
for this moment.
Through Mondays cramped with meetings.
Through Tuesdays of unending paperwork.
Through Wednesdays of pointless errands..
Through Thursdays too scattered to think.
Through Fridays filled with anticipation.
Through evenings too tired to raise the remote.
Past chores that double into the infinite,
and boggle the mind at their insignificance.
I’ve been waiting
so long
for this moment
and now I feel it
running out; circling
like brown toilet water,
before clear water
fills it again.
But the odor lingers.^
^Eat your fucking heart out, Emily Dickinson
Photo by Bradley Stemke
Still Life in Red, White, & Blue
We lean along the fog
like Otis Redding’s airplane
On the morning of September 26, 2016, I was making my morning bike commute down Damen Ave in Chicago. I whizzed past stalled traffic, wondering why the street was uncommonly jammed, but soon noticed flashing lights in the distance. As I approached the intersection of Damen and Addison, I came across a scene that will haunt me forever. A bicyclist’s worst nightmare. A fatal accident. Everything became very quiet, very still. I got off my bike and walked it across the intersection as a cop directing traffic told me to “be careful out there.” My eye was drawn to the driver of the truck which caused the fatality. Disheveled, distraught, soiling himself. I can only imagine the trauma that he experienced and continues to experience to this day.
We lean along the fog
like Otis Redding’s airplane.
Horns honk.
Traffic is packed like
passengers on the Doña Paz.
EMTs stand and stare
into the mist
like veal calves.
A man in soiled blue jeans,
eyes rimmed red,
like the moon in Revelations,
breathing hard, receiving oxygen
in the back of an ambulance,
white as an avalanche.
The Schwinn,
like a robin’s egg
smashed flat
upon the asphalt,
something sticky,
(not quite yolk)
squeezed around it.
Nearby, a white vinyl sheet
with a cooling heap
piled beneath.
An unpluggable leak
laps against the grime.
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?
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.
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
〰️
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.
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.
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.
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.
FREE CHAIRS!
I found a hundred free chairs
today, while walking from my
motel room to a knockoff
Starbucks. These weren’t
chintzy aluminum
folding chairs, but
fully-loaded, cushioned
armchairs—some with
stains—upholstered in
textured marmalade chenille.
They were really free,
with a sign which read
“FREE CHAIRS!”
out front, that slipped,
rotated ninety degrees,
and is the only reason,
to my mind, that they were all
still there, on the patio
of the downtown Billings DoubleTree.
I thought, for a few strides,
about the many people who
had sat in those chairs
through the years, at
wedding receptions,
optometry conferences,
wakes,
and what stories
the chairs could tell,
but soon got overwhelmed,
and anyway I don’t have
space for even one
free chair.
Disturbing the Peace
Even here, where terriers lag,
their liquid tongues lengthening
towards the grass,
as the shade of catalpas
slides across lush acreage;
even here, amidst muted cheers
for a field goal,
above the shuffle of shoes
aslant a soft lawn at dusk.
Atop the 60-hertz hum of cicadas,
rumbles the crushing current of
rubber across pock-marked pavement,
the sandpaper shift of a school
bus’s transmission,
the skitter of gravel, pealing
behind a rusted ‘96 Saturn SL,
the idling ComEd rig, slouched in an alley,
the scrunch of hubcaps on curb,
the metal-on-metal scrape
of the dumptruck’s brakes, the
bravado of Boeing 737s—sharpening
their approach—one after another,
every thirty seconds, or
the scissory swell of a whirlybird
chopping towards the Edens.
Every silence strangled.
America Answers
So sorry you’re dead
to the Murdered Children of [Insert Latest School Shooting Location Here]
So sorry you’re dead.
Prayers up for your family.
It wasn’t the guns though.
It was the guns.
It wasn’t the bullying.
It was the bullying.
It wasn’t toxic masculinity.
It was toxic masculinity.
It wasn’t the gun lobby.
It was the gun lobby.
It wasn’t social media pressure.
It was all the social media pressure.
It was the guns.
It wasn’t the guns—we need MORE guns.
It was the lack of mental health resources.
It was the lack of background checks.
It was a failure of parenting.
It was violent video games/movies/television.
It was just boys being boys.
IT WASN’T THE GUNS.
IT WAS THE GUNS.
It’s the spineless senators.
It’s the feeble leaders.
It’s the Second Amendment.
It’s your problem, not mine.
It wasn’t personal.
What’s new on Netflix?