Unmade bed in a storm of white sheets beneath blinds Christmas this year feels mournful. Not just for the obvious headlines; but the air holds incense of discomforting flavor. Writing still needs to happen, though. Right? I haven't written in months, despite my longing and desire. Despite all the reading and thinking. I'm currently reading …
Pre-Order Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive
Pre-orders are now available for Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive, my third poetry collection due this June from Black Lawrence Press. These poems are memories, meditations and monologues. Stories of witness gathered during my time living in West Oakland around 2007 -- before and after. Oddities and encounters formed into poems while; standing at bus …
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Shaken
Seizure: being grabbed and tossed to the ground. In an instant, I became a bucking horse, forgiven everything except this moment. In exchange for a mouthful of blackened bacon sweating grease, here is a chaser of carpet and the hail of a table's debris. It is unusual, to say the least, to awaken face down on a carpet, …
Creative Non-Fiction at Two Hawks Quarterly
The nice folks at Two Hawks Quarterly have published my story Madagascar, my first attempt this year to send out something else besides Poetry. (Not That There's Anything Wrong With Poetry). I sent it out on a lark just to gauge what would happen-- what happened next was a huge surprise to me. It was …
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BBQ Ribs For the Dead (on Writing, Loneliness and Repurposing Poems)
In two days time, there will be an office memorial for a coworker who died the weekend of my birthday. I came back from my personal 3 day weekend and a secretary passed my desk, stopped and told me how over the weekend Linda had died suddenly. I'd worked with her about seven years and …
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How Do You Write Poems?
SPOILER: I don't. They write me. I woke up in time to catch CBS Sunday Morning and the moment it was over, I clicked off the television, already annoyed by the Sunday morning crew newscast, and started getting myself dressed and my stuff together. Four notebooks, some print outs of articles and Other People's Poetry …
We (don’t) Need To Talk About Kevin
By mid-day Sunday, Taqueria San Jose was packed. The gorgeous restaurant feels air lifted from Mexico and is bigger than you're currently imagining, with an outdoor fountain on the rarely used and kind of small brick patio. I ordered lunch and armed myself with chips and salsa. As I hit the door to leave, right …
Alternative Lives
There were several strikes against this poetry event having any audience at all. The first was it being scheduled on a Saturday afternoon at 3, when other even main event readings I've attended don't begin filling up until after sundown, irrespective of the day of the week. Second: beyond being asked by the events organizer …
Spook!! There it is…
In the mid 90's, after my mother died, my house was haunted. The only house I'd ever known, The only place I'd felt safe and loved. But at the time there had been a series of deaths-- not in the house, not violent, but all familial, all relatives. My father's death surprised me. And I'm …
The Stranger
In the last poem I wrote about my mother, in which I tell a story about one of my last hospital visits with her, there briefly appears a woman named Theresa. Theresa was my mom's closest friend in the last decade or so of her life. Theresa's oldest daughter and I are Facebook friends. And …
The Dirty Rat 