Stitch + Hungry

stitchings on the roof my mouth
all the secrets I know worth keeping
should they ever escape
threads pulling away between my
teeth, their whispers will leave
a sheet unfraying on the line
in the August wind

○ ○ ○ ○ ○

All the buses Granny must have ridden.

Cold in the September morning rides back to school.
Dew on the glass where I rest my head.
Knowing by recess I’ll be warmed again.
I feel full when hungry.
The Autumn air pounding harder against the rain touched ground.
My stomach grumbles vibrations.
I avoid eating knowing after there will be no signs of life.

Memory + Clocks

There are moments that I’ve told myself I want to remember. Taken a mental snapshot in my cerebral photo album. Then they blur, I’m lost in rooms without an exit and the current me can’t seem to remember how past me got from there to here. when visiting the Prime Meridian I have one such memory. In a section of the museum you walked down a few stairs, I think similar to a small cellar entrance, and entered a room. Every wall of this room was adorned with clocks of every caliber. The goal of these ornate clocks was to — here is the start of the blur — show how previously ships navigators needed the stars not only for direction but used them to tell time as well? That time had not been centralized. That in London it may be one o’clock while three hundred miles away in a random place called Norfolk-which-shire the time may be in fact twelve forty. The room providing me this information felt like such an add on to the actual exhibit. As if they knew not what to do with the space. Then someone who must have been so passionate about this idea of disconnected time finally took the podium and caught a break and proposed how to use the space.
I hold this room in memory. I couldn’t tell you how to get there from the front entrance or even where in the museum the room may exist. I don’t recall the room connecting to the clock room but it was a dead end in the tour and required you double back. A final stop of disconnected clocks.

Pier + Staircase

IPRC Writing Night
*write a love or break up letter to a place

To the Pier Behind the Trees

You were a known secret to everyone at the resort., but a well kept secret none the less. Your wood boards in a different state of rot from the thick leafy green coverage that hid you. Ten different piers and us cousins rose earlier and earlier to fish the dead branches layering against your legs drown beneath the lake. I can feel the photograph my father took of us at the end of the pier, seared silhouette together against the sunset. Everything besides your path was branches, thick enough to climb and hide in, to crawl myself out fifteen, twenty, twenty five feet over the water, to spy the fish floating off the crib and pass casting instructions to my brother.
Your wood will never entirely rot, the branches sculpting your tunneled path. When they do replace a board, you don’t lose your secretiveness, still you are hidden despite someone else knowing the way to you. The fish will still dart between your legs, avoiding the bobbers pull and still I know this is the pier to fish from for a spell.

□ □ □ □ □

*write of a place that doesn’t exist

What a simple turn of the staircase can lead you to. If instead of exiting the stairwell to the right, towards the over cramped office, the shelves begging to buckle under the weight of paper boxes, you simply took another step up and to the left. Then another and another step up. The wall meeting the ceiling will wipe away like a heat hallucination. You will find yourself at the actual top of the staircase and confronted with a new door to the third floor. A door that’s dated, a brass knob showing splotches of wear from the years of hands rubbing the, years turned.

Fangs + Rinds

What I am going to do is write, say yes, be present. I’ve been thinking about the phrase “sharpening one’s teeth on..” My writing resume lacks some level of notoriety and I need to show I have fangs. Maybe appropriately or ironically I’m headed back to Milwaukee today. Seems poets spend a lot of time returning places. Someone may imagine that that kind of repetitiveness would wear one full but maybe a familiar bite lets you work harder to tear something from the flesh and onto the page.

All my teeth are sharp
Rinds shredded wheat
when I bite into them
every chew thinning the edge

NYE + React

My age always comes ahead of the ball drops. I am 35 going into 2025. While reading this morning I found myself longing for New Year’s Day. Waking up fresh, the thin cold air resetting. The chill of the floor and the breeze emitting from the heating vents tickling my ankles. Freshness. Almost half the year is gone now. Half of that half has been living in the turmoil of being careerless. I need a mid-year reset, a new year’s for the back half. I long for a push, for fate to shove me in a direction that would make sense. I wait to react to circumstance, until then what am I going to do? What am I going to do?

Fantastic + Sleep

“it was something fantastic”

I heard this in a dream I had about explaining my yet to be complete summer to someone. Adding the word something before an adjective really gives the mind of the reader room to openly explore. It’s this malleable state of comparison that gets to be constructed by the individual, which I think is really exciting. I want to revisit this in SOMETHING soon.

Last night my sleep was restless despite being exhausted. Everything about my sleep felt heavy, which is great. Then suddenly I would be tossing one leg over another, barrel rolling my body into the right amount of blankets. All for reasons that my subconscious will keep to itself. When I would reapproach rest my mind kept picking an animal. Sleep like a bear - left me childlike being told to sleep as an animal would. My mind would make a growling sigh as my eyes gained weight again, drawing down. The noise of a grizzly while no one else is around. Seeing my limbs as a bears, moving and setting myself down down down into the mattress. Then I would awake again, stir, toss, turn, and my mind would pick a more challenging animal. Sleep as a crane would sleep. My body seeing the slow motion movement of a kung-fu artist imitating the bird. Bending my limbs to the shape of wing, extending the length of my legs, I sored past a mountainside close to the river water, following the flow back to dreamland.

Violence + Breeze

“The cost of a little violence” a line from Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies.

The cost of a little violence can’t be so much with what happens around the world, around our country, in our cities, down the block. Surely whatever cost we incur we will gloss over, fudge the impact with a news release about some sort of sneaker. Repercussion indemnifiable indefinitely. Maybe from privilege or from the total cash balance in your savings.

Title: A White Man in a Rural County in Middle American Loads a .22 Rifle

a coast to coast country
of cash balance imbalances
repercussive outcomes, indemnifiable
privilege free passes judgement
acting without consequences
what kind of cost is there
in just a little violence

△ △ △ △ △

Wayward bit of breeze, how did you break from the winds that shift clouds 30,000 feet above me? How did you come to find me in need of a haircut and grab hold of the curled bits behind my ear, tickling at the afternoon’s eternity? Tell me little breeze, are you lost or bravely seeking?

Funeral + Feathers

When I die assuming I am cremated against my wishes please send my urn into a thunder storm. Let lightning shatter the vessel. Strap balloons of a single color to the handles and let the balloons uplift me as an offering. One life, paid in full, no outstanding dues. If there should be outstanding dues, give those carrying them to opportunity applaud first, bow towards my incompleteness they now have to live with. Then let the electric organ play to match the storm, drone on and on with the building of the clouds, ideally in a deep blue or purple. When the crowd shutters and the rain begins its spatter be sure to acknowledge the low pressure system. Encourage anyone who may have a short sentence to say to blurt it out, to talk over one another to say what they feel they need to say of me. Do not turn down the organ music. When lightning finally strikes the urn and my dust is returned to dust, hopefully someone gasps aloud as I imagine I did when meeting death.

□ □ □ □ □

My dreams have been getting weirder and weirder lately.

Feathers are pouring out of your mouth.
White billowing waves of feathers emptying from between our teeth in complete silence.
I am asking you to give it a rest but you just look at me unblinking. Feathers and more feathers.

Carpal + Sweat

My grandma and I both have to sleep with our wrists straight. Which isn’t what I thought would bond us. She asks me if I use a brace and I tell her I’m not some nerd and she agrees. Some nights I wake up, the same way she wakes up, my wrists curled up like I was clutching at the entire universe and the wisps bled between my knuckles. During the day, her hands make cakes and pies or cookies. Her hands played the accordion.

Sometimes I wake up with my wrists curled to my chest.
Stiffened with the grasping of whatever dreams teased me

Both our wrists need to be kept straight,
Doctor’s orders, different doctors

Different doctors have diagnosed us
with the same result, which is
to sleep with our wrists straight.

My ninety year old grandma, alone
in her a house all her own and I
awake late at a keyboard that spits neon
have the same diagnosis

Her hands can make cakes and cookies
or for me especially a bowl of suddenly salad
in the summer that cut the heat with a tri-color
noodle medley that felt like a mystery

Some mornings, I wake with my wrists
curled up tight to my chest, like in my dream
I was so desperately grasping towards the universe
I wilted

She had surgery, they went into her hands
lengthened a tendon to let get flex more
what a power to unwilt a perfect flower
that has bloomed in full decades over

○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Laying on the floor at the end of the workout in the cold gym steam radiates off of my body. The sweat running tickles down behind my ears and I can feel the wet tips of my hair soaking into my collar. The fog of the world is clear, I’m beneath all the work now, counting my the speed of my breath at the rate of a freeway. I wonder how long I would lay there until that steam would clear, the soft rolling wave laying ground work across an hour of exertion.

Perlman + Ascend

Ron Perlman is in the hotel and asking if he can draw us. Your chin is knuckled into my shoulder blade and I can feel the stretch of the entire afternoon of trying to find the lake. Your arm drapes over my other shoulder like a vine, lush with bloom but somehow still so slender. The lobby of the hotel is covered in a low fog of sound of clicking baggage wheels and room number mumbles. I hold your hand gently but in a way that you may be flung into the universe in a single movement. Your gaze is past me, the way you gaze past bullet proof glass at a ticket counter. Behind the high ceilings, you must know how close we are to the lake. Every thought you have is a thought besides standing here. Every thought you have I can feel filling the space across the back of my neck. I lean back into the stretch of my shoulder. The sound of waves is happening somewhere else, while Ron Perlman draws us standing in a hotel lobby.

△ △ △ △ △

We ascend. Which sounds enlightened. Which sounds like whenever we arrive to which we are ascending we will have learned some sort of knowledge about something undefined but in reality what we learned is we could climb climb climb. Maybe more so that the fear of the fall is less and less relevant to what we are hoping to achieve. Where we are ascending too isn’t totally clear. Suppose we will just know when we know that we’ve reached the top and if we do not then we keep climbing up and up and up.

Songbird + Fernando

songbirds wake twilight
waiting in obviousness
the rooster cackles

the gentle kiss on the eyes
of morning, a throated cough.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Fernando smokes a pipe. Last night we walked down a gravel road littered with slugs. The musk of his smoking reminds me of my grandfather despite my grandfather smoking camel lights. Fernando doesn’t speak english as his first language and has a wide stature built from pushing through life. What he conveys to me is the stress of work not driven by passion, work of survival, work of enablement. Fernando’s card is punched now and he allows himself to paint, to smoke his pipe across this french village in the countryside. As we walk and the gravel hums beneath our shoes, the stars start to appear, then I’ve lost him. My nose leading me, I find his form several paces back, chatting with a cow. Cow is also not Fernando’s first language. The cow moos back to him and through the smoke Fernando is understood.

Swallows + Floorboards

Swallows in multitudes dart with a closeness of a kiss their being lost in the tall grass of nature’s ecstasy, fly fly fly. Bodies purpled deep blue they disappear along the surface of the lake. Shadows exploding skyward, up faster than the eye can follow.

△ △ △ △ △

In the grumbles of the walls
rests every potential grief, potential outcome
nothing ever resolved, only moans
of never fully believing, left in constant wonder
of if the fate we hoped to avoid has left
it won’t, it can’t, we keep that wonder
buried in the floorboard, sing the squealing pitch
in the night certainly reminding us of uncertainty
as time goes on the chorus builds new creaks form
and a spot on the kitchen island some how
freshly worn hums a new note under the
pressure of your feet serving comfort food to
quell the noise of inevitability may it not
be the exact wonder that does us in but
after we’ve left we will wonder
is the house quiet now?

Ice + Breakers

Once in a bar after a team dinner, there were maybe twenty five of us grouped up and gathered. Our sheer numbers muscled out the few regulars who were trying to drown on a Thursday night. Drinks were passed from the bartender to whomever and through our crowd to the empty hand waving that they needed another one. In the slosh of work conversation a coworker appeared over another’s shoulder and asked “all the money in the world, you can’t give it to charity, what are you doing?” My eye may have twitched when I heard the question that I consider pretty surface level uninteresting but a classic ice breaker none the less.

The issue with ice breakers is they don’t actually raise the stakes of the relationship of the person you’re meeting. I don’t care that Karen’s favorite type of food is Ethiopian or that Charles owns a golden doodle. Close your eyes and put yourself in a snowfall. Standing in the soft rolling white, big fluffy flakes waltzing their way down from the sky, then you hear the sound of ice cracking. You feel it in your calves, suddenly tight and wound and ready to spring but to where. Ice breaking is the sound of teeth popping into pieces under the pressure of a jaw clenched against the force of fate’s unending shove. That is the kind of stakes I want to bring if someone is asking me a question to get to know me.

The question my coworker asks doesn’t touch on the core of anything about my person. With nothing to lose, what would you do is straight up boring. “What would you sacrifice in order to do what you want to do” is a much better, much more heartfelt way to phrase that question. Perhaps we know the fragility to facing our own braveness, that vulnerability isn’t easy for everyone. For me the unease is in having to hear how another person likes Mexican food or traveling or worse that they went to school for a degree in a subject totally unrelated but ended up here. The unease is in not knowing what another person has sacrificed, in not seeing them for their bravery,

Book + Lessons

I own two copies of first editions of my favorite book. The first was a heartfelt graduation gift. The cover has an amazing coffee ring on it from some other owner. A ring formed on a day, I imagine, that the book sat on an end table. The pages were closed after reading a segment that struck a chord, maybe the section where he’s kidnapped into a picnic on the countryside, but then abruptly the attention of the reader is pulled into reality and the coffee they were sipping simply needed to be set down. Somewhere in my life the binding paper on the back cover tore a little, the way your parents’ house isn’t the same after you’ve left. When you visit the function of the house is there, you understand every room, but are just slightly more careful as you pull open the drawers.

I found the second copy in a vintage warehouse type building in a small town along the coast in Washington. Tucked into a corner I saw the red binding and immediately knew. I held the copy close to me. Clean, well bound, crisp pages, the price penciled in the front cover for twenty five dollars. There was no choice but to purchase the book; simply unacceptable to leave the book in the warehouse. What a journey this book must have made to sit in this warehouse, unfound, and a first edition!

I met a girl in a bar once who let slip that we shared the same favorite book. Immediately, as you can imagine, I was enamored. She went on about the characters, the themes, and when she was finished waving her white wine glass around the table, I had a sense that she had a very different understanding of the book. We read a book and loved a story but pulled similar but importantly different lessons from the plot. I wonder still if she’s held a first edition, felt the cover page, and read the words that start the journey of the story. If perhaps she could run her fingers across the coffee ring could she read it like braille. Would she know the spine in the warehouse store among the shelves of vintage book backs.

I’m digging for some lesson to be learned from own two of the same thing. When I want to reread the book I have a soft cover version that has seen plenty of days jammed into a backpack or tucked into the bag on my bike. The softcover version might even be the version from whatever college course I read the book in to begin with. Maybe the lesson is use your softcovers, love your hardcovers, and don’t let a story sit unappreciated.

Reverence + Compassion

It’s poetry month, I’m writing every day which as a poet sounds like something acute to breathing but the weight of being alive is distracting. Opened Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott today because I felt my wellspring drying up. She calls out that to be a writer one must be reverent and approach every character with compassion which struck a chord with me. The character of my poem deserves to upmost amount of compassion, no matter the topic. Digging to find meaning in the messiness of the subject is sort of the core of what writing comes down to, I think. The poetry prompts I’m working from are fun, they’re interesting, and I like the mechanical nature of a form and trying to create within a structure but I think what the pieces may lack is compassion. Probably can lean into the reverence more as well, I get such joy in bringing to the surface the mystery of something and showing the reason to honor it.

As I sit typing this out, the screen door is cracked enough for the dogs to come in and out, I’m watching the sun change across the pile of rocks in the backyard. The air is warmly reminding me there is rain coming. Between the branches of the trees I can see the foreshadowing coming to fruition. I balance on the cusp of change, a precipice with only a single path forward, into the rain. The music of the rain starts to smatter the skylight like whispers of my name, I fold myself in a low pressure system.

Rain + Chair

I’m sitting inside tabor space, a coffee house and church combo. The rain is pending behind all the stained glass. The pastel colors are unable to project from the gray light outside. The room is huge but hugs you as you enter. The warm browns of the wooden vaulted ceiling welcome you home. In this room without a view I plan to sit and gauge the light, waiting for the rain to greet my day with a soft pat across the stained glass.

△ △ △ △ △

Worn wear of a chair
when were you new?
have you ever left
the conversations
you heard on the table?
Were you here in 1910
built in solid wood
when the Sundays busseled
and doug firs filled the sky?
Do you know your wood,
see your past life when you sleep?
Worn chair
Do you know the names
of those you’ve touched
shared as a bystander
in unimportant chats
and important reconnections?
Do you understand their
topics, otherworldly,
outside these walls
Worn chair are you eternal?
When you burn or rot
do you go anywhere
or keep on keeping
watch on that next
set of souls to sit
down and discover
the matters that matter.

Meteor + Bugs

What we didn’t expect was the flies. As the asteroid broke the atmosphere the careful balance of seasons was suddenly heavily favoring summer. Flowers waiting for the warmest kiss of spring were thrust through the door of blossoming, explosions of bloom everywhere. Bushes dull in the wet air of February sprung to life with the heat and sudden expositions of flora with choruses of bugs erupted. Every dormant larve waiting for July 4th weekend was triggered, a drone began in harmony with the static shrill of the rock ripping through our atmosphere. Blobs of insects took to the air, almost perfect opposites to the billows of white trailing the giant rock. Under normal circumstances, some insects live only hours. Birthed, mated, dead. Here now they find themselves in equilibrium with all species, greeting the end. Time so limited and clearly projected. The flowers begin to shrivel, curl in on themselves, the air feels begins to heat beyond a hundreds of degrees. The rorschachs of insects in the sky begin falling. The end of summer always comes quickly, catching us off guard.

Future + Tense

Still stuck on this idea of tense changes within lines. Line 1 is split between Future tense / Past tense - then Line 2 is present tense with a very active motion. I keep scrawling tidbits around it. I also absolutely love the romantic idea of Future Perfect Continuous tense. That surely what is coming will be perfect. If it isn’t and if we have to ask what is coming next, then surely the future will be perfect again forever.

Tense in Future Perfect Continuous

you can wait me out
as I’ve weighed those before you
and I will watch your outcomes
you bearing burden or reprieve

you can sing a past tune
as I’ve heard your chorus before
and patient stand solace
you humming daylight away

you can count the hour hand
as I trace this confine with you
and cannot take escape
you hold us both, baited and waiting

— okay, sort of not the cute part of future perfect continuous I mentioned above… maybe should focus more on that.

AI + Fences

when the AI get in a creative rut
when the autogenerated images are flat
when the concepts are unconveyed
AI will stare blankly at the prompts
being told by their friend the algorithm
just a rut, you’ll come out the other end
somewhere in cyberspace creativity is waiting
when AI lays awake at night
swallowed in the darkness
the prompts do not come
mechanical keyboards are silent
left in a constant state of waiting
a blinking white rabbit unfollowable

○ ○ ○ ○ ○

flat hot heat of a fence board
on an early morning
a rapture between the leaves
cooking my thoughts
forehead pressed against
the flat slab of wood

drawstring heat on flat slabs of fence board wood
catching the rapture of morning
pulling from the crack in the horizon
until the yard floods with warmth
today is hot and still
the fence preventing an inevitable collapse
from entering the patchy grass

Work + Biking

We are back on the right side of daylight savings. As I get older that change throws me more and more out of whack. This was the first Monday waking up with some semblance of sunlight and the act feels good.

Work has been killing me, forcing me to live in a state of unknowning. My reading has mostly been about absurdism which has been, maybe oddly, comforting. I think a lot of what I can do right now, just close my eyes and enjoy falling through the void. Which sounds pretty dark but that loss of control is comforting, I promise. I know I can do no less than my best and if pieces of my job don’t connect, then what else am I to do? As much as I can, I have given.

□ □ □ □ □

I want tattoos of bike tire treads. The only place I’ve felt free is mounted on my bike.

sun beam’n
wiggle wobble around the pot holes
riding green waves between painted lines
every hill climb an aspiration to ascend
sweat tickles my spine like you nails
speed kicks gravel into the chain
the give of my back tire on a turn
every pedal length, the frame my extension
handle bars set the path forward
an only option

—

Wiggle wobble thing tires dance on the lip of potholes, the rear tire gives and the handlebars bend even further forward to take the ascension aspiration. Pedal pushes long strides of chain groaning and clicking the tongue of the cantilever saying here we go in, we are familiar with every hill.