Category Archives: New Releases

wave goodbye with hands so dry, they could be a note in white wine

Novels are the soccer of art

Rain again at the ruin. Time fills every crack,a gas the sum of all other gasses.

Suck it upLike a Kirby in a sandstorm     Dutifully emptied  Hose torn

Sheets of robins stretch the sky Leaving sweat and seeds behind

you stir your hot toddy with a sprig of spruce and argue the line between 2018 Billie Eilish and 2024 Beetlejuice

Sunlight crashes off the moon then off your cheek You say the pain’s a little better this week

Fresh cut on the fraser fir Severs ten years of earth from earth

Six years old in bed with chips Picked a fan blade and followed it

life is too short to wring the wrong necks   to keep hives without honey to not go west

I sweat the body electric, two steps out the door. I should’ve never gotten up off the floor.

Oh the number of times I’ve driven you through Lands whose billboards Are hostile to you

In what moment will I appear stupidest to my daughter, I wonder, standing in the end of the yard where the jasmine smell doesn’t reach

When the dawn breaksIs the pillow over your headOr the phone in front of your face?

There you sitat the edge of your bedscanning cable for tits.and on comesPenn and Teller: Bullshit

Suitcases slept in the car Kid didn’t sleep at all First family drive at dawn

I took a long drive. The first anniversary of the last night you were alive.

Who keeps the zookeepers?

Have yet to divide Still just reducing The fraction

The most beautiful frames in film history: – Bruce Campbell exeunt Darkman – Patrick Ewing in The Exorcist 3

Bold of my therapist to expect change when their waiting room magazines remain the same

Could a pumpkin rind protect a man?

I’ve seen that actor’s face long enough that I love them.

Inquiring unfinished lives want to know: What contractor is gouging and ghosting on god?

rise, accessorized in pug fur, and summon the nearest cheese

this fury’s almost nourishing, like olives ripening over and over

Every bar I ever saw you play is closed. It’s a shame, I know. It’s a shame I know.

I remember the kitchen but not where we would’ve kept our wine and spirits

You wouldn’t think there’d be such a big difference between Decembers 2022 and 2023.

Summer is a home invader Florida can’t kill.

If this cold front doesn’t hit us, I’m done fucking for the year.

not being happy makes me so fucking angry

Swings, slides, and wind chimes. Cross Main Street for a croissant and to watch traffic.

In the field behind the honors college dorm, the Stetson-wearing, Black-and-Mild-smoking virgin playing Travelling Willburys songs on his mandolin goes unnoticed.

Minnie Ripperton wrote “Loving You” in the next neighborhood over and shamefully, reader, there is no shrine.

The hawks don’t seem To mind the increase of bubble Activity in our backyard

For years I mistook Those squeaky ducks For bats

if we had more friends, we could pick more blueberries

the fêtes are full of frets when all the guests could be hosts

On a hill in Jamaica Plain, I saw a band I’d never see again. And all the folks on that hill with me, Just as likely I’ll never see.

I didn’t know how to be in a skate park Or watch a ska band Until I closed my eyes to listen And got made fun of

Been on the bench these beautiful days, meaning not participating, not on an actual bench, which would be nice.

What’s being woven with the cosmic cotton that appears to us as clouds and dust? I hope an oversized nightshirt, baseball sleeves, big enough for mankind’s knees.

I can remember, as I grew taller, the feeling of my arms hugging higher and higher up your back, eventually over your shoulders, and now, just over. I love you. I love you.

How long is the sky’s recovery after lightning? Because it takes my back a week to calm a spasm.

a week later, what’s the closest I can hope for…. …maybe a hot air balloon… to place me up amongst the last carbon you exhaled…

and the next day, no less dead

We stop to watch the dance studio’s Revue under a tent On the soccer field Across from the church

Wiping my daughter’s stuffy nose Is like reaching back in time To wipe my own Like old grapes on a new vine Like new eyes on mashed potatoes

I wait in long lines for overpriced theater wine, but outside when we part, I’m certain any second the show’ll start

the burden of freedom is knowing we’ll have to try swing dancing again

wander until your hips horse me home at last

During the hurricane We did our dancing In a doorframe

There’s a fizz to the wine though I know it’s flat. My tongue’s usefulness cut in half.

How many years of treading water with white knuckles in an ocean with a bomb in each wave

You tell me you named your daughter Coraline because you love Tim Burton. Your ego is bound for a very peculiar death.

Every day since 2020, Distance and no guarantees. Your breath is drifting up to me, A Lazarus of normalcy.

We shush our dishwasher like librarians. In one of the infinite universes it may wake the baby. And God forbid that universe is ours.

Select the play-by-play announcers of your life: Steve “Snapper” Jones and a sandhill crane.

Facebook says my high-school crush is born-again exhausted, meanwhile I sleep in tongues

I’ll love you ’tilthe red storm of Jupiteris near enough to be named.

Between moss strands in that finch nest is all that’s left of the syllabus I assigned myself.

need a rest from trying and failing to rest

By the time you feel better I’m a wreck in your wake Trading hangovers like yawns

We no longer refer to our hugs as trips to the gun show. Deferentially, we now feed each other’s 24-inch pythons.

ashes to ashes, bit to bit — can’t skip death like a a hip-hop album skit

study the arc of that girl lifting off her toboggan, put yourself between her and a birch in a Rochester I could never visit

A fear so stupid, shared by so few, but that casts such a long and deadly shadow — as if, say, all the people who’s favorite film is Farce of the Penguins had the right to smother my children’s children’s children and then pay senators to yell at me about it.

Phil Ochs, grab your gun. Beware public funds for sports stadiums.

Been bouncing around without walls somehow. I want a pit. I want it now.

our final text just rests and my pulse takes the momentum of a lake

Foot control minus will power, I lurch from under the carwash dryer, dewy from the cocoon.

wind was leaking from the trees and salt was lifting off the seas I bit into a decent peach

There’s only one friend’s mom’s face I remember; the rest dissolve like Crystal Light in tap water

none chose, some called to divorce splinter from thumb of daughter

Stroller stuck in the pasture, baby’s first agrotourism.

I play WiiSports while you, drive home in the snow, waiting to dig you a parking spot.

Will all the snot I ever wiped on my childhood sleeve reincarnate as crust in my daughter’s eye?

I feel included like the many DIRECTV and Bose technicians my dad kept inviting over after installation.

Play-Doh picks up a patio of pollen, so Youngest Cousin decamps to play bartender.

Once, a house-sized gator peered into my room with its window-sized eye, and I got my dad to get his gun.

Fifteen minutes — one-fourth of one billable hour. And the longest I can stand without a look at you.

When I look at you — so many problems, whereas my W-2 — so many commas

This year I made a lumber stack and next I’ll make a lumber rack

White sky bares the vulture flock Frost cloth shelters the strawberry crop

Frustrated in the beanbag chair. PS2 controller battles the wall and loses again.

Change the subject but the bachelor uncle is also an expert in that.

You got a message to me despite my Lisa Simpson avatar and inside joke handle.

one of us finally lived in a place with central heat, so we gathered with guitars and our pet Springsteen covers

there’s doom and there’s grocery store misters water-logging the cilantro like this was a beached whale rescue

Am I the ostrich chick under your dark dome or a pup at the foot of a blue agave at the mercy of the next careless weed whacker sweep?

All the discarded fats clogging my pipes this winter once were loved.

A whole clan raised in Rochester and only the middle brother claimed the father’s Pittsburgh accent

Slow bike ride in the rich neighborhood. Clouds above, restored Dart in the driveway.

Scan the treetops spot what’s probably a hawk and like a high school class or a hit movie cast who’s got the best ten years ahead — eyes, pine, or whatever that blob was?

In our private corridor between surf and dune, sand streamed against our shins like it was sick of not being a river.

bad mail all week, but my brother-in-law’s grilling burgers tonight

Quite the scandal, the first time I ordered falafel in front of your parents

Papa was an ant dangling from a cobweb; Mama was a white wall

my namesake, the mold endemic to cars abandoned streetside all summer

After-dinner porch gin reconnects you and mosquitoes.

Despite what my boots say, there are limits to  my faith in the honky tonk.

Cream ale, amber ale — Rain undermines umbrella — Soon cool evenings.

Whiskey slime coats the remaining ice |__| a patience I can’t muster in myself

At 32, I reached the axis of mastery and decay. But with no arena in which mastery to display, all I can practice alone is decay.

Cross the street between bands for two slices for four dollars and to piss

I check the stove I check the dryer I pray my cat would run from fire

these times link to the Controversy section of god’s Wikipedia

the one cousin we don’t usually get stoned with is now stoned with us

walk by the room again wonder when you’ll fix those shelves if you wonder at all

my dreams dulled after the one where we’re ferried ‘cross the tundra in vegetable-oil vans

Whether or not there’s more to come / thanks for the work you’ve already done

The Edict of Deerfield Beach coronated your hips and my slice of clam pizza

we were born in time to teethe on that week of good peaches that grow here

To nightclub in my town, return to the steakhouse where you had dinner

Puffin of the rock Osprey in the transmission tower The abandoned study of timber in literature

Papaver somniferum oilseed thereof folded into my gums forever

hard rain floods the duck pond, shores kissed by a potable god

the pocks remain, but no more the pock-marked leading men

Surrender our damp, wooden wishes        endless splendor never much thought *words from “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Changing of the Guard” by Bob Dylan

it’s not the wasp’s fault that I also live here and have inherited better poison

I tip the pregnant bartender with silver  dollars; she grimaces

I crash into the king Pillow between us like surf Into a sea wall

Never made friends so I never knew a dealer so I never smoked alone and walked its streets so did I ever even live those years in that city?

coaxed a condo from the clay; long day and my dogs are chirping

maybe matter cannot be destroyed_________________but what ______________does that matter?

mistake the sun for golden fog Disney ‘n’ Amazon take turns as underdog 

Clorox spinach can of wine / Another week of not yet the last time

Bossa nova overhead, Jaws on TV, I’m at the bar and know nobody

swallows rise  from brush to branch like opposite rain

How many more R.E.M covers before you’ll want to kiss me? Will the next one make me look like the boys you like — all veins and ribcage?

tie me to an office chair and launch me down the bike path like you used to

Dredging eggplant makes me think of my mom thinking about her aunt

Feel old yet? These punks from the all-ages shows can now today get into regular shows.

A fistful of roots held the dune since Avilés. My fascia felled by a desk chair.

when Moses of the Sawgrass sang gatorsong in deertongue

we spiked our Starbucks and busked outside the Barnes & Noble; and we were alternative

Coconut adrift so long it turned barnacle boat

Open pool, lone baby Polish Jew, 1943 Disaster and proximity

Some noise amplifies silence. Owlcall, your footsteps.

squat at the gate listen to the congress of cranes at the treeline

We chew silently on the osso buco I started too late.

If the sun should rise over just one Virginia, I’ll request “Freebird” of Gabriel.

same flannel adorns the first kid the bus eats each morning all winter

bloodless fingertips no spin on the ball empty court, Anchorage

last time I saw a city, I was cranky in a tight button-down

beside the boardwalk feral piglets obscured by wild fennel

I set fire to my used tissues, godding (“to god,” transitive verb) smoldering spineless cranes

Signs on county road lawns and in financial district windows realize the horror Halloween suggests.

Bare walls again. We’ve hung larger frames with lesser nails.