Upcoming Readings

Saturday, September 18, 2010, 2 PM: Firecracker Press, 2838 Cherokee Street, St. Louis. Reading + simultaneous broadside printing of one of my poems. $5 admission (includes your own print of an excerpt from my poem).
Friday, October 1, 2010, Time TBA: Subterranean Books, 6275 Delmar Boulevard, St. Louis. With Alexandra Teague, Eileen G’Sell, and Jennifer Kronovet.
Monday, January 3, 2011, 8 PM: Observable Readings, Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest Avenue, St. Louis. With Eileen G’Sell and Kristina Marie Darling.

Sample Poems

Commencement Address Penned on a Bar Napkin

Assemblage of loose limbs besodden on Alumni Lawn
sprayed evergreen for your parents, in whose wake
live-oak leaves quake as irises plant in front, your dream
of the organic chemistry final administered by a monkey
benzene ring will never drain, unlike a bottle of bourbon.
Even if Java Man was a coffee-mad, knife-happy gibbon
buried under floorboards, he graduated before some
of your cousins. You, music major: does saying Handel’s
Surprise Symphony surprise the hell out of Haydn
in bed? Oh, this mid-May humidity misses Empedocles
and his ability to assemble cumulonimbi. Drill Holbein
through your skull, and you too can paint the pants on
Henry VIII iamb iamb while he wrestles France’s Francis
on the Gold of the Field of Cloth and names a blank
framed paper after you. Rum comes from a great tumult
and soon returns to one. I have wasted my education.

(originally published in Barn Owl Review)
 
 
 
Start Watering Me, Please

Between us, the bar counter ticks
dollars of talk. The warthog who bores
through rock walls with his stories and fills
Bud Light bottles with spittle sits two stools right—

to my left, the tip fairy’s darkling sparklers.
You dissect local elections with me because
whatever even though you’ve seen my jaws pop
when whatever. Remember when

that flirt, that out-of-order tease, refused me
quarters, and you said the change machine
wasn’t all that wouldn’t change? You’re alert
and chirpy as a hummingbird. If I don’t stay late,

how will I tell your eyes are still brown?
Offer me coffee you know I won’t take after
I pay for my last suicide cocktail. Now you need
to feed me like a ficus, not a cactus.
 
 
 
Stories from the Warming Wars

New cars ran on tears and fired their gasoline from cannons. Factories ran on fear and fabricated only smokestacks. Artificial plants inhaled oxygen, exhaled chlorofluorocarbons. Babies toddled charcoal footprints.

Cattle manufactured fertilizer, overflowing levees and chestwaders. Fish that mated laid eggs less developed than their legs. The final polar bear floated four starvation days before its floe unfroze with solar flair.

Sun and a methane lens battled against central air. Sunburn and tornados met in the trailer park before they tore it up. Sunday and noon meant midway to volcano. Sun and on and on it went.

Humidity licked and lapped humanity. Vigilantes caught a watermelon and beat that fruit with bats. Everyone constructed effigies of weathermen. Suddenly, somebody combusted.

Poems Online

New Poems:

Haunted by Waters & What Moves In the Attic (diode)
Everything Looks like a Target (The Collagist)
(The Rumpus)
One Frame Famous (Pebble Lake Review)
Five poems (Front Porch)
Something Might Be Gaining on You (The Nepotist)
Four poems (Sawbuck)

From Torched Verse Ends:

All the Better to Eat You With, My Dear & If It Bleeds, It Leads (Beloit Poetry Journal)
We Never Did Anything (originally published in Copper Nickel)
Hayman Wildfire Set by Forest Service Worker (originally published in Natural Bridge)
Sturgeon’s Law (originally published in Court Green)
Deathmatch Mode (originally published in Bat City Review)
Coal Seam Fire (originally published in The Bitter Oleander)
Clockwork (originally published in The American Poetry Journal)
A Little Schadenfreude (originally published in Copper Nickel)
Phoenix, Colorado & Without Glasses (diode)
Self Portrait in a Funhouse Mirror (The Pedestal)
Here Be Dragons (Valparaiso Poetry Review)
Late Night Driver at Lightning Lizard Pizza, Advice on the Psych Ward, Who Sketches the Sketchers, & Albuquerque Low (Seven Corners)
Penultimate Taunt & Quantum Topology (not in book) (MiPOesias)

90 Percent of Everything (e-chapbook, Scantily Clad Press)

Interviews Online

First Book Interviews
The Collagist
Barn Owl Review
32 Poems / Savvy Verse & Wit
Very Like a Whale (on editing)
Very Like a Whale (on poetry)