Potrero Stage Theatre, first night sound check Prelude A friend calls monthly, like one would check in with a therapist. A mutual acquaintance has brought her to tears multiple nights. Who is open to just listening beyond me? Our years together, she's earned my patience. But one night she stopped and asked about me. How …
Year-End Review
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 …
Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive – Book Reveal
Congratulations! It’s a book!! Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive is now available from Black Lawrence Press. The bulk of poems in Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive represent attempts to finding myself as a poet, by training my eye to focus on and validate things I found beautiful or curious or odd or all of the …
Continue reading "Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive – Book Reveal"
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 …
Continue reading "Pre-Order Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive"
A MONTH OF MAGICAL THINKING: ENTERING ROOMS
(For a matter of months I've drafted an entry intended for this blog and every approach to the keyboard was met with a cleansing sigh of defeat. Maybe I've lost it, I thought. But in those same months, I've also wondered about spending the month of November writing. its funny to consider: After NaNoWriMo nearly …
Continue reading "A MONTH OF MAGICAL THINKING: ENTERING ROOMS"
Reading In Public
I consider poetry 'work'—reading it, representing it, writing it. Whereas my actual 9-5 means little of nothing to me. A solid exchange of my time for my rent. Thank you! I don't always enjoy showing up for work. Some days productive, others a slog, others: eh. So I endured the day in office, even the …
Re: Writing (Or Which Notes Do You Think I Should Cut?)
Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to revisit the 1984 film, Amadeus. I'd been anxious to rewatch it for a while and was relieved when it became available for streaming. The award-winning story (both on Broadway and in Hollywood) was about Mozart as experienced by his resentful contemporary composer-rival, Salieri. There is a sequence …
Continue reading "Re: Writing (Or Which Notes Do You Think I Should Cut?)"
The Blonde & The Bad Luck Monkey (A Poem As Time Machine)
I'm bored. I wrote a poem the other day! but dislike posting brand new poems since I'm supposed to submit them to journals and stuff... If I can ever get it together and follow through. So instead, here is a older poem that I have long loved, but will never read again publicly or publish …
Continue reading "The Blonde & The Bad Luck Monkey (A Poem As Time Machine)"
Listening To Marian Anderson Sing Go Down Moses For The First Time on Vinyl
Hear it yourself on Archive The vinyl noise floor of a 78 sound of an enflamed red curtain opening to an audience of ghosts filling the black air A piano primes the ether in an imagined drawing room All these years this song was launched in bass throat cannons To hear it aloft, living through …
Continue reading "Listening To Marian Anderson Sing Go Down Moses For The First Time on Vinyl"
My Pineapple Roommate
The only scent a rose may come to envy is a pineapple on the vine in the east facing window of a 3rd floor apartment. Confident and exotic, the plant announces itself before being seen, owns its space, and was the first plant I ever purchased a weapon to defend myself, my skin, the corner …
The Dirty Rat 