Friday, April 9, 2010, 7 PM. AWP Conference Offsite Event. Meadowlark Poetry Marathon. 2701 Larimer Street – Denver, Colorado. With a cast of dozens!

Friday, May 14, 2010, 7 PM: InKY Reading Series, The Rudyard Kipling, 422 West Oak Street – Louisville, Kentucky. With Keith Wilson.

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.

Flee the Beast or Be the Feast

West of heated
     East of eat
Draughts no water
     Drinks in drought

Tongue without mouth
     Roar without lungs
Scars without claws
     Runs without pause

Son of lightning
     Sun of mankind
Lights nighttime
     Dims sunshine

Downhill deadfall
     Revived upslope
Leaps over river
     Leaps over road

Oilblack trail
     Tail of smoke
Hollows wall
     Swallows hall

Windless wing
     Song of cinder
Lands in timber
     Ends in ember

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.

New Poems:

Haunted by Waters & What Moves In the Attic (diode)
One Frame Famous (Pebble Lake Review)

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 (MiPOesias)

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

Barn Owl Review
32 Poems / Savvy Verse & Wit
Very Like a Whale (on editing)
Very Like a Whale (on poetry)