This poem appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Slant.
I.
The scars on the wood on this table beneath
My mug tell no good tales, they tell
No good stories but with dark grooves they cut
Constellations in a dirty sky.
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This poem appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of The Lyric Magazine and received the publication’s Leslie Mellichamp Prize.
Follow the shore as it rises alee,
Bereft of the wind and deprived of the sea.
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None of these twelve songs are about real robots — the self-propelled mechanical lackeys that vacuum our homes, deliver our packages, and show us the surface of Mars. But some of the songs do mock our fears of the little Frankenstein monsters we’ve created, or the bigger ones we might someday.
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What if the features splayed across my face
Did not do justice to my character?
‘They are all male’ and ‘They are all in wigs’
Tom Lubbock wrote, but they are not the same.
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You think you know something about John Milton. He was blind. He was English. He was a Puritan. He wrote that interminably long poem about Adam and Eve, the one that literature majors perhaps still labor (or slumber) through.
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What does he deliver, the postman? Unfinished pale streaks coming together in one hand, Blood red outlining the other, blue etches that show the sky, What do they possess? What did he see in those beady dark eyes that followed him around the studio, Pink face vomiting green beard?
Note: If you landed here because you’re curious or excited about Amazon Prime’s new series The Peripheral, welcome! I am too. I wrote this post a bunch of years ago about the novel the series is based on, and it prompted one visitor to call me “a slightly crazy reader.”
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I write because I like words. The way they sound. Alone. In sequence. The way they mean things. How their meanings change, multiply, when collected together. I like sentences even better.
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Classic tales can–and should–be told and retold. Will Poole’s Island, by Tim Weed, feels like one of those stories: comfortable, like something you’ve owned forever, yet fresh, because you’re seeing it with new eyes, against a new backdrop.
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Something I’ve been doing as I prepare to transition from “aspiring novelist” to “actual novelist” is attending a lot of book signings. I’m fortunate to live near a number of good independent bookstores, so there’s never a shortage of interesting writers passing through town.
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