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Poem Selected as Finalist in the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize

2011-04-01T13:44:00.002+13:00

I am pleased to announce that my poem "On Thunderstorms" was selected as a finalist in the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize judged by Natasha Trethewey.

Poems Published in West Branch

2011-03-26T08:50:00.002+13:00

I am pleased to say that my poems "Drinking Stories" and "The Same Idea" have both been accepted for publication in West Branch. Again, due to my busy schedule, I do not have the time to update the poems to the blogsite at this time, however, I do hope to get them up as soon as I can.

Poems Published in Prairie Schooner

2011-03-21T13:06:00.001+13:00

I am pleased to announce that Prairie Schooner has accepted for publication my poems "Hounds" and "Working First Shift at the Progresso Soups Factory."

At the moment, I am busy working on several projects, but once I get a chance I will post both poems up for you to read.

Poem Published in Cold Mountain Review

2010-11-07T08:22:00.002+13:00

The Pecking Order

I

Steps from the chain link fence, schoolboys
shove each other below the schoolyard magnolia.
They pelt the runs of pale flowers
spotting the stocky limbs, use fallen pine cones
and rocks and lumps of loose asphalt to pick off
and drop the tree's stubby seed pods.
They split the gathered shells and pocket
the red kernels hidden inside
like lost marbles. No one asks why they do it,
no one counts the dropped or split husks.
They just follow the play some boy started,
yell and fight because someone else did.
They try to seem bigger than they actually are.
They forget what the teachers say
and step over the magnolia blossoms
scattered among the knobby roots like birdseed.

II

Whether they remember or are curious again, C.G. and Ruth Byrd ask Victor Recondo
_____about how he knows Jerry Vines.
We're brothers, he says. That's right--you're brothers, they respond. They do this because
the whole retirement home whispers about this, and are restless with the answer.
_____The Byrds, like every other resident, believe the pair is something
like a married couple; they look over Victor for his "brother's" family looks, but find
nothing to allow what they say to be. They grapple the queer lisp of his Spanish tongue
_____against Jerry's Manhattan-speak,
they compliment his diamond-freckled pinky rings. They inquire, We hear Jerry
_____gets cafeteria takeaway for the both of you, carries it back in a basket.
Jerry brings me a picnic dinner every day, Victor returns. They Byrds and the retirement home
are left with this, whether or not they are restless. Victor tells them they are brothers,
_____and it is different from the salad days. Victor and Jerry take the questions
_____and whispering tenets with their picnic dinner.

III

This is how I heard it. Run off the road, my uncle's
boyfriend in the drainage gulley, barely breathing, the officer

parked beside the curled guard rail and muddied ditch.
My Uncle Darren held Carlos by kneeling behind him

and draping his arms across his heaving chest.
This is what the trooper saw of the two men;

he called in an ambulance for my uncle's boyfriend,
asthma attack; he whispered over his radio to the dispatcher,

said he suspected alcohol or foul play. Carlos
belted to the stretcher, hospital bound--the officer walked

back to the scene, and my uncle ready with questions
and how-is-he-doing's. The trooper fired back

with the sobriety line and tests and further inquiries;
he yelled at my sobbing uncle, "Stop it, goddamn it.

You got no right to hear about him. Stop bitching,
you faggot chicken-shit." Tired of his cries,

the officer wrestled my whimpering uncle
into the backseat; he stepped on the shard of windshield

and car pieces sown along the field ditch and soft shoulder.
"I got no choice, but to take you with me,"

he said to my uncle. "You brought this on you.
You must have been on something."

Poem Published in The Pinch

2010-10-28T09:12:00.003+13:00

"Milford Sound" was selected to be published in the Summer 2011 issue of The Pinch. This piece is one from a series of poems centered around my travels in New Zealand.

I hope to have this poem up for your reading pleasure in the near feature, but due to semester obligations (once again) I will be unable to post it at this time.

Poem Published in The Greensboro Review

2010-10-28T09:09:00.003+13:00

"The Root Whiskers" was selected to be published in the Spring 2011 issue of The Greensboro Review. This piece is one from a series of poems centered around my travels in New Zealand.

I hope to have this poem up for your reading pleasure in the near feature, but due to semester obligations (once again) I will be unable to post it at this time.

Poem Published in South Carolina Review

2010-10-26T14:40:00.002+13:00

His Grandmother as a Wind Chime
-for Julia Brewin, August 29, 1928-September 1, 2006

The grandmother can't help dragging her kidney-
colored housecoat on the Dalmatian shag carpet,
her short legs like onionskin, her hair a shrub

thinning in fall. She can't help the army of candles
on her marble cake, the bruises, needle pricks
and scars on her fingers, or that she passes away

in her sleep three days after her birthday, her grandson
crying, a year old, crawling head first into a coffee table
as his parents empty hangers and closets,

vacuum rugs, trash jars of potpourri from the pink
and green bathrooms, unhook and pack up
the prized wind chimes that clanged by the side door

where she'd sit and clean cornsilk and husks from cobs
of Silver Queen and Jersey Sweet. The old house sells,
and the tinny clammer of chimes sings in a new kitchen

as the grandson mouths words and sounds
from his highchair, his mother baby-talking to him,
"Hear that, honey? That's Mom-mom talking to you.

Say 'Hi, Mom-mom!'" By the time the grandson
is naming objects--laundry bins and diaper boxes--
his parents tuck him in his crib, and years later, ask him,

"Did you say goodnight to Mom-mom? Go say
'Goodnight.' Ask her for good dreams." He totters out
of his room, kneels beneath the wind chimes and whispers.

And the grandson believes the raw metal tubes,
the knotted thread and steel loops are the body of his lost
grandmother, croon to him throughout the day,

knell approval at the sight of crayon sketches--a boy
perched beside a wreath of ringing pipes. During art class
at the kindergarten and elementary school, he sculpts

modeling clay into snakes and little hammers, comes home
on the bus to a snack of grapes, a backdrop of soft gongs
and tolls, his mother declaring, "There she goes

again! I swear your grandmother only makes a peep
when you're here!" He gets dropped off
at the middle school early so he can raise the state flag

outside the main office, stays after for band practice
where he plays the vibraphone and sits first chair. At night,
he has dreams of swinging, strings and cords hugging him,

his limbs hollow rods, his mouth a ringing bell.

Travis Mossotti's poem "Decampment" now a Short Film

2010-10-26T11:59:00.002+13:00

I am pleased to announce that a friend of mine, Travis Mossotti (of Saxifrage Press), had his beautiful poem "Decampment" transformed into a brilliant short film directed by his brother, Josh Mossotti. The artistry of the written/spoken word and the landscape that is created is a brilliant pairing. Congratulation to the brothers.

For the rest of you, check out Decampment.

Poem Published in North American Review

2010-10-11T08:43:00.004+13:00

Scrap Iron

We hunted for steel along flat-bottom train rails--glass
_____blanketing the gravel track bed like chickenfeed,
jimsonweed weed stalks between creosote-steeped timbers--
_____picked over buckled trailers and garbage stacks:
cracked pump heads, mower blades, band saws rusted mid-cut.
_____The clang of spikes and bolt heads lobbed into a bucket
was a lesson he taught me in milking the wasted land.

Those days were oil tanks chain-dragged home
_____on the city road; rotting doors charred in our backyard
so that I could rake the hinges and metal from the ash.
_____Those days were broken appliances I held down
while he tore off the unwanted plastic and rubber gaskets.

Evenings, my father exhausted the fridge's thirty-rack
_____one beer at a time and reviewed the math of cents per pound
as I swatted away drones that hummed from wasps' nests
_____in the trashed air conditioner's A-coil, in and out
of the mouths of empties I crumpled under my heel.
_____I refastened the flapping sole of hand-me-down boots
with screws plundered from a pool scrubber head.
_____The tiny spirals shined in my palm like loose change.

His long weekends off and the truck bed crammed full, wreck
_____balanced and roped, we drove across town to cash in.
"Don't let them see you when we get weighted on the drive in,"
_____he warned me, balled below te glove box, hiding under
work shirts and newspapers, palms cupped over mouth
_____masking my breathing until we made the junkyard's jagged heap.

Knowing that we'd make an extra forty-five bucks if I
_____wasn't in the truck during weight out, I snuck
my way around the hissing hydraulic compactors, hustled past
_____the growling machines and grease-tanned forklift drivers.
I kept my hands in my pockets and thought about what was worse:
_____if one of the dump workers found me, or the look on my father's
face if they did--how if I didn't get caught, my body
_____an extra hundred and twenty some pounds of scrap.

Poem Published in Quiddity

2010-10-10T17:33:00.003+13:00

I am pleased to say that my poem "Palace Depression" is going to be published in the latest issue of Quiddity out of Benedictine University in Springfield, Illinois. Besides this, I am to record an audio file of me reading my poem, and will have it played on the NPR station out of that college. Whenever the file/link is available, I will include it in a future post. Thank you.

Poem Published in The Labletter

2010-09-01T16:07:00.004+12:00

Standing in the Atlantic Ocean with Tesla's Pigeon

I'm buttoned up in midnight's jacket, star-glow
pinpricking the pitch black. Foam ribbons along the water's edge.
Warped pilings splinter lightning rods. Walking into the ocean,
wavechurn belting my waist, I squint into the six inches
I can see around me and watch the chalky smudge
of the milky way loose itself against the flash of a coming storm
tucked up against the horizon. The sea flickers its offering back,

and a smack of jellyfish rises to the surface. A yawn of tentacles.
Umbrellas with no wires. Suddenly plugged-in, the soft bells twinkle on,
a riddle of light doubling as the sky's reflection--bioluminescence.
And as I see them glimmer on like bulbs in streetlight globes
it's with the same awe as when Nikola Tesla stared at lampposts
erected like bookends on ever New York City block
and watched Edison's filaments ignite with his alternating current.

Eighty-six and skeletal, still a fine figure in a three piece pinstripe,
he picked wads of bread crusts out of his pockets,
walked up 35th to 5th Avenue. He sowed dinner crumbs by the curbside
for pigeons. The neat split of his hair down the middle. His ears
perked to neon's buzz and traffic din; energy chugging
through the city's veins set him in a trance. The whole earth
struck him like a tuning fork. In that sounding tone, Tesla remembered

how electricity's pulse felt coursing through his body:
the itch under his skin as he allowed jolting limbs from his coil
to crackle and hum for miles and kindle the flickering tongue
inside of him. The wound copper and pipe--a mushroom cap of metal
pinned over a stem of cords. On the opposite side
of his study, the distant thunder of his sparking machine lit beacons
in his hand, unattached to any gadget. Lifted power from the open air.

Swooping into room 3327 from the nest of leaves and twine
on the window ledge, Tesla's pigeon--the one he said he loved
as a man loves a woman--perched at his feet. Gray wingtips.
Fluorescent white. He believed it spoke through its eyes, beams of light,
powerful, dazzling, greater than any lamp in his laboratory.
He stared into the burning ink-drop pupils and dreamed a whole flock
followed in and speckled his suite white, a glinting chorus. Their bulbs

like the stars, like the jellyfish circling around me, the lightning blazing
a midpoint in the stretching dark. All of the other details blur together:
constellations curving overhead and rolling out in front,
the gleaming blooms beneath, and the stars' watery echo.
I reach into both heavens, my skin aware of itself,
waiting for the arc of electricity from that storm to pierce
my body and flip a switch, spark whatever it is inside of me to flash--

enamel and bone and hair, now phosphorescent. Did Tesla want light
to beam from his eye sockets? Maybe man is enamored
with the sweetness of mirroring the cosmic, and--despite how fragile
and broken we are--is able to glow. I hope there is a morsel
of cinder in all of us. And when every candlewick is snuffed out,
when every light goes cold, I'll blink the only way I know how,
the earth's clamoring resonance, my crude refrain lost in the endless pitch.

Poems Published in Milk Money

2010-08-28T04:40:00.003+12:00

"Bivalve, Cumberland County" and "By the Margin of Water" were selected to be published in Milk Money Volume Eight, When Jeff Goldblum Speaks, We Listen.

I hope to have these poems up for your reading pleasure in the near feature, but due to the start of the semester (my teaching and class taking obligations) I will be unable to get them up.

Prose Poem Published in Poet Lore

2010-08-13T17:38:00.002+12:00

Midnight Shift

I knew what the power plant kept from the house. Two in the morning, my mother would nudge me awake and carry me on her hip into the master bedroom. My father's side of the mattress looked bare. The alarm's red numbers scarred the opposite wall from the mirror hung above the headboard and the turn-dial television blinked in the corner. A preacher was on channel five, waving a green handkerchief with gold trim. He promised the swatches of material cured arthritis and sickness, healed wounds and brought money to a broken home. His faint whooping and laughing kept me stirring though my mother curled over on her side and fell asleep, a man's voice humming through the house. I got up to switch on the ceiling fan, crawled to the knob, searched the stations but settled back on the preacher's infomercial. It looked like a flood had slicked and pinned back his hair. If I had enough cord to walk the telephone receiver next to the screen, I would have called my father to ask him if he lit the lamps in that church. If I had enough cord, I would have dialed the number to have the holy man pray for my father's machine-crushed hands, his missing fingers.

Poem Selected as Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize 2010

2010-04-25T14:37:00.002+12:00

"Jersey Devil" was selected as honorable mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize judged by Maurice Manning. Brenna Lemiuex was selected as winner of the prize, and Hannah Katie New was also selected as an honorable mention.

Poems Published in Los Angeles Review

2010-04-25T08:09:00.002+12:00

Jersey Devil

"Struggling to survive with twelve children, [Mother Leeds]
became distraught when she realized that yet another addition
to her overburdened family was on the way. Cursing her
hopelessness, she cried out in disgust, 'I am tired of children!
Let it be a devil!'"

- James F. McCloy & Robert Miller, Jr., The Jersey Devil

Whenever the ruddy dusk swallows the sandwash, the barrens,
children fed on devil stories tramp the woods' footpaths.
They shoulder branches whittled to spears and prowl
the rock shore, wade into bog shoals and back--legs stained
from the creek ore and much. From rickety forts,
they map and raid the scrubland. They palm knives,
scour the treeline and timber shanties, ramble home
toting their marsh-blackened boots. The children peak
through curtain gaps during summer downpours,
play lookout from the covered porch--this is how they keep
the family mutt from slaughter. They wrestle the stream-
snagged lure with the thought: it's him. The wild thing
that snakes along the forked river as the brave

plunge from the dock ledge into rusty water.
The shadow that buries its hoof trail under pine needles
skirting abandoned deer stands. The savage who loses
its wing-scrape and forked tail in the windchurned oak boughs.
And when night paws at the window, the light-empty bedroom
fakes the creature's black-jack lair, dreams flash
the mud-padded fur coarse as bark, wild fangs like a jaw of briars.
Mothers and fathers wake at the sound of their own
sharp gasps, bawl and whine the Jersey Devil hunts for them.
The children light house lamps at the same black hour,
sweet-talk and shoo away the wicked. They stare beyond
the glass-pane and drapes, the yard fence like a band of teeth,
and wonder if they are already tucked in the beast's belly.

From These Split Ends
-for Jessica Keough

After I proposed marriage, we decided
to start cutting each others' hair.

First time, I was drunk on vodka tonics
and used poultry shears, but she trusted me

enough to score off a few inches.
We did it standing in the apartment's

old cast iron tub, naked, my hands trembling.
Her curls made it difficult. The blades

didn't trim right, and I strained to snip each lock.
While inspecting the workmanship,

I dropped the shear, nicked her ankle.
I forget how exactly she reacted, but it was calm--

something of a soft glance down.
As I palmed the clutch of her strands,

worried over the neat horizon of her cut,
her manner suggested to me, there is time to get better.

Split ends in the wastebasket. Her right arm
over her breasts. I brushed off a lone hair

perched on the crook of her arm
and offered my hand to ferry her out of the bath.

Poem Published in Copper Nickel

2010-03-06T04:35:00.001+13:00

Field Lessons

Dr. D’Amato mused about consciousness and suffering

between his engineering lectures,

apprised parables for me after class hours, once said

that when he thought about his ex-wife,

he remembered how her second toe

was longer than the big one. While he told me this in his office,

he made tea on a plug-in burner,

fed his office plants with a Mott’s Apple Juice jug,

adjusted books on shelves, offered me Meher Baba—

how love works, when God speaks,

how we have not come to teach, but awaken.

That afternoon twittered on until I wished he had curtains

that better covered the snip of light

teething through office windows,

how I wanted to speak up instead of just sitting in a stiff chair,

but he quickly slipped into another story, said:

three army medics were training in Richmond’s

big hospital, assigned to dress gang wounds,

the run of car wrecks and construction trauma,

surly boys wrist deep in sternums and innards,

patching and sewing. A week in,

the soldiers were paged to resuscitate some grandmother.

The battle went on, paddles charged,

needles emptied, but still she died.

Left to toe-tag the lady, these three decided

to rehearse procedures on the body

(hand-over-hand, neck veins tapped, extra potassium).

During their geriatric wisecracks, grandma woke up—

freckled with sensors, draped in an oxygen mask—

and startled these three green berets who couldn’t help but hug her.

They’d patched limbs, but never saved somebody.

My old professor reprised,

wondered out loud if they felt like God,

if they noticed the doctor handing pamphlets to the family

for managing these things—sudden passing

and grief and final arrangements—when all I pondered

was if long second toes can curl, if people can heal.

Poems Published in The Pinch

2009-12-18T16:48:00.002+13:00

Our Lady of the Water Glass

Just water, but they started praying to it.
A simple birth: kitchen tap to glass. Somehow
a pedestal wound up underneath it, the highball
garnished with votive candles and laurel boughs.
Prayer groups founded odd-night vigils.
Every long while they would drag an atheist in,
force his gaze onto the relic, and suddenly
the Godless one falls into spasms and wheezing,
spitting grunts. Believers mark it as speaking
a holy tongue. The mass applauds after it, every time.
You can tell which cult groups have stopped over
by the offerings they left--those
stains aren't so easy to clean. Tough to say
who carved up the first statue; the synagogue downtown
declares they've got proof it was them, but nothing
has turned up. Though five blocks over,
the custom built four story Mosque spire
and observation tower grants the best view.
It took a while but the city settled into a shcedule.
Six a.m.: the choir wakes the neighborhood with
O, Aqua Divina, Visit Our Spigot. Out-of-towners
get the shrines until noon. After one o'clock lunch break,
every denomination and group gets fifteen minutes
until midnight. Once a month they change
the floral arrangements. With each season,
the city council hires an army of carpet steamers
and the County Jail convict crew to primp the grounds.
Every holiday, the streets flurry with men and women,
children and fighting dogs, clubs and book verses,
brawling over what is theirs, who is thirsitier.

The Group

When a friend first mentioned the weekly meetings, I figured
Hilry or Sage started it, scribbling gathering times and phone numbers
on women's room toilet stalls, pinning fliers with code words
and cryptic messages to grocery store cork boards, a support group
for my ex-girlfriends--old flames circled and sitting in folding chairs,
crying and hugging in between trips to the punch bowl and sugar cookies,
whining about what kind of guy I was to date.

Ridiculous. Depressing. A murder of ranting past lovers.

My idea of the get-togethers changed when the letters started arriving
every Thursday, no return address--notes asking questions
I can't respond to:

How could you use the same love songs and mix-tapes
as Valentine's Day presents for each of us?
Why would you go out with three girls, living in the same
apartment building, on the same floor?
Do you really think flattened antique spoons shaped into
bracelets really makes a good anniversary gift?

The penmanship never matched with the piece of mail before it,
and the private detective I hired explained there was a pool
and election process for the writer.

Names aren't recast into the drawing until everyone has a chance.
They're considering expanding the discussion into your personal
shortcomings; your insufficient diet, your lumpish bed pillows.
That sort of thing.

It all sounds so impressive. They rent out the New Italy Society hall.
They have a buffet of hot hors d'oeuvres and local wines,
a rising attendance, and flowchart of my inadequacies.
Maybe if they mailed that to me the growing membership might level off,
but I imagine they like the deal with the caterers too much to cancel.
I have dreams of them, in line, holding paper plates of Angel's food cake,
waiting their turn, each one touching the envelope to the tip of their tongue.

Poem Published in River Oak Review

2009-12-18T16:33:00.002+13:00

What Einstein Saw Before Typing Out His Theory of Relativity
1896, Journal Entry titled, Of X and Y on a city tram:

I see her step from platform, and lift with his hand
into the moving box--the dress a fancy thing
(...of a fabric I may have felt only once before),
the purse a clasped silk liver. On board, they stall
for a moment, then sidle into the car seats
split by the walking aisle (...she charmed
by the passing streetlamps, he hushing wrinkles
from his shirt cuffs), and they don't speak
to one another for the next six blocks.
Great webs of sunlight fan low across his waist.
There is no scuff of time passing, until I notice him
twitch and wake to where they are, and rather than
nudge her, he plucks a timepiece
from his vest and catches the glare. The flash
lures her back--she turns as if leaving a daydream--
and he replaces the token like a secret.
This day is a feeding spoon (...his watch chain
a snapped violin string, her hairclip a brassy pinwheel).

Poem Selected as Winner for Yellowwood Poetry Prize, Published in Yalobusha Review

2009-12-18T16:08:00.004+13:00

Our Lady of Mount Carmel
-for Pop Peanuts

Under the soggy shell of my great-grandfather's skin, muscles
sour and nerves unlink like the backyard swing's chain.

He chaperones me on the first floor of his redbrick on odd
Saturdays when my grandmother and mother have their nails

filed and colored. An ill babysitter: his legs are petrified, his hands
are near-useless. His wheelchair tows a bladder of tubes and plastic.

I smack the catheter as if it was a watery punching bag and sing
with the clatter of loose boards below the rolling tire tread.

During these visits, he asks if I want to play parent and has me
wipe out ashtrays, boost him up plywood ramps and switch channels.

He chatters about his butcher shop or how he kept the porch
flowerbox while I tear open wrappers and feed him candy.

Sleeper sofa unfolded year-round in the den, I wonder out loud
how come he gets to camp out each night by the turn-dial Television.

He recalls a church festival rather than answering me.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, my great-grandfather is remembering

blessings and safe passage you once bestowed immigrants
en route to blueberry orchards, how their small lawn procession

became a city parade and fair. A throng of kneelers at candled shrines.
A week of cooked sausage grease dripping from sandwich buns,

funhouses and carnival rides sticky from spilled beer. A feast day
of hangovers and sanctified rosaries for sale. Holy Mother, please

wheel him one last time between the pastry vendors and Sons of Italy
clambake stand, into St. Joseph's Parish to your painted image.

Let him pray for another chance to weed his tomato garden.
Let him have his funnel cake supper, a paper plate of long hot peppers.

Virgin Mary, tame his wild bed of morning glories by the pump spigot.
Carry his brittle husk upstairs to a bed where he hasn't slept in years.

Poem Selected as Semi-Finalist for the New Millenium 2009 Contest

2009-11-06T17:42:00.002+13:00

My poem "Fidel Castro Visits a Frat Party" was selected as Semi-Finalist for the New Millenium 2009 Contest. Though it was published in New Delta Review, due to the size of subscribers, the poem was eligible to be selected for the contest.

I look forward to seeing where this poem will go in the future.

You can read the poem in the post below, showing where/when it was published.

Poem Published in Iron Horse Literary Review

2009-10-16T16:56:00.002+13:00

On Peeling Skin

After mowing the yard and field,
skirting grass clippings around raspberry plants,
burning dead shrubs and cracked porch lattice,
my father came in--his dinner plate
already made and placed in the microwave.
First, the patchy kiss from thumbing open
the tab of his beer. Next, the TV channel
switched from Unsolved Mysteries to Night Court.
He washed his hands after eating,
knocked off his boots, and rested facedown
on the living room floor. And finally,
when the windows were slid open--our house
flooded with night breeze, with bug chirp--
my father gave the go ahead.
My brother and sister and me huddled around
his bare, afternoon-baked shoulders
and laid our small, cool hands on his still warm back
and began stripping off flakes of sunburned skin.
We tended him as if we could peel
the mark of hard work from his body.
We had contests to see who could pull
the largest piece, the best shape.

Poetry Manuscript selected as Finalist for the 2009 New Letters Literary Award

2009-09-25T12:09:00.002+12:00

My manuscript is still under review for publication at New Letters. The poems in the manuscript are listed below:

From These Split Ends
What Einstein Saw Before Typing Out His Theory of Relativity
On Peeling Skin
Our Lady of the Water Glass
Burning Down the Camper

I hope to hear from them soon, and will update the blogsite if any get accepted.

Poem Selected as Finalist for Guy Owen Prize, Published in Southern Poetry Review

2009-07-04T07:05:00.008+12:00

Burning Down the Camper
-for my father

For seven days my father scavenged the junked camper.
He deveined copper wiring from the walls,
took sledge hammer, crowbar and cat’s paw to kitchenette cabinets.
His shunted boot buckled doorjambs. His hands
severed sewage lines and salvaged the propane stove top.

For seven days, he planned it while dismantling the rank trailer—
wrist deep in the musk of petrified mouse carcasses
and sun-cooked frog bodies, insect shells
littered along sills like rotted raspberries we plucked
from the garden patch and discarded in the walking rows—

how he would mound farm crates and splintered rafters,
use taproots for kindling, set it ablaze.
He separated brass knobs from drawers, screws from lumber.
And after seven days, on his weekend off
from the electric utility, he warehoused the wanted parts

in the garage loft and exchanged his scrap iron cash
for two cases of Milwaukee’s Best. He piled the RV shards
in a heap—layering house trash, wire casings,
Styrofoam cooler chunks—and hollered for the family to watch
the bonfire from bare cable spools in the backyard. My mother

refrained—with the billowing fumes too much for her allergies
and my infant brother to lull to sleep—but my sister and I
scrambled beyond the back porch and bobbled around the pit,
waving sunflower stalks like wands over the tattered flames,
chanted gibberish incantations, and with each Abracadabra!

our father would chuck empties into the glowing center.
Raking the coals with a bean stake, he mumbled
a lesson that the worst hell glow was not orange, but white,
that dinosaurs filled our minivan gas tank,
that—if we wanted—we could spit on the blistering steel

and watch the dribble vanish, so long as we didn’t get too close.
So, we mustered saliva, hocked as much as children could, laughed.
But our father had other plans, gutted the shed
for sandbox toys and Wiffle Ball bats, kicked playthings
to where we sat and promised us that we would see magic.

He moved a plastic alligator closer to the heat, until
an inch from glare, jaws melted, eyebrows and paws puddled
on the bare earth, and we wanted more. Wads of Sunday circulars
flared green, burning gas station coffee cups gave off a pitch smoke.
Window screens shriveled and glass panes burst.

Two-liter cola bottles, after a flash from the garden hose,
collapsed in on themselves as if ghost wrung. He used
words like vacuum and pressure. They meant nothing.
By bedtime, all that remained was more beer cans and rubble
coughing up ash, embers giving way to the match heads of stars.

A night dirge. The pucker and fizz of singed wreck.
My mother called for my sister and me to come in,
that the fire stutter was a conversation for adults,
but my father—enjoying his dawdling children—yelled back
that we were just fine so long as he was able to stand.

Words turned to marbles in his mouth, the way he spoke
our names, a muttered hex. His guttural song
kept us awake, cursing the power plant and its graveyard shift,
as he gathered his kids for the homemade sacrifice of shrubs,
mowed grass, crumbling shed roof and front deck cross beams.

The knot and grain of stubble around his chin.
The stock and rings of work callusing his hands and fingers.
A shit camper. Hulk and debris rescued from house repairs
and fix-it jobs, good for one last thing: The mystical.
The power in anything that will burn.

Poem Selected as First Place for the Delaware Bay Days Poetry Contest

2009-06-11T05:53:00.003+12:00

True Oysters

“Oysters, the Only Game in Bivalve”
The New York Times
Saturday, April 11, 1992

It was hunger they cast from the docks, a long pang
that kept cattailed mudflats barren, ravaged
the mucky shoreline of booming mollusk beds
and concrete-block shucking houses. It was
hunger that slinked up the Maurice River, the forking
inlets and backwater channels, a parasite
shallowing oyster crops and grounding boat captains.
This is how the brackish wetlands speckled
with salt-rotted wharfs and crumbling fishing shacks,
and lost the clack-song of split shells piling,
of tin cans brimming with briny hearts. Even then,
there was the ebbing wake against gull-stained
pilings, a rude wishbone for rich tides and fresh catches.
And each winter when the marsh dusted with snow,
when the currents ferried ice shards, the bolted houses
and starving locals waited for a harsh cold
that would nearly break them, freeze the bay and only
give them a memory of what warmth is like,
give them no pearls, no handouts, but the slim chance
to work themselves for true oysters in the spring.

Featured Poet: May 2009 Vol. 1 #7

2009-05-07T05:14:00.004+12:00

Although it is a site run by a good friend, I am still excited to announce that I am featured on http://saxifragepress.com/. If you scroll down a little bit, you'll find me. If not, check out the options on the side bar on the right.

It has a picture, bio and three unpublished. Visit the website, look around, read up and come back to it. It is worth the weekly/monthly attention to stay abreast of up and coming poets and great poems.

Thank You, Postmaster General. (Two letters at the price of one!)

2009-05-04T10:07:00.005+12:00

A Letter From a Friend...

A Letter As Printed On a Plastic Bag Holding the Letter From a Friend...

"Dear Postal Customer:

We sincerely regret the damage to your mail during
handling by the Postal Service. We hope this incident
did not inconvenience you. We realize that your mail
is important to you and that you have every right to
expect it to be delivered in good condition.

Although every effort is made to prevent damage to
the mail, occasionally this will occur because of the
great volume handled and the rapid processing
methods which must be employed to assure the
most expeditious distribution possible.

We hope you understand. We assure you that we
are constantly striving to improve our processing
methods in order that even a rare occurrence may
be eliminated.

Please accept our apologies.

Sincerely,

Your Postmaster"

Poem Published in Packingtown Review

2009-04-22T07:04:00.003+12:00

A History of Nut Allergies
Phoenicia, 333 BC

Gods cast split pine nuts blessed with the swell
of wave-crash, and when swallowed
by desert women, these seeds sprouted sailors in them,
offspring who whistled for life beyond the shoals.
A populace of nomads branded for the ocean
flew to Canaan, planted docks and shops

along the seaside, but felt at home cradled in ship’s hammocks
rocked asleep on the water. Their hulls
sullied the Mediterranean—banner swathes
draped over the balustrades, fishing skiffs and dinghies
tethered with hemplines. Drenched in midday sun,
the gulling merchants shucked pistachio shells

and offered handfuls of walnuts and Cobb nuts,
You want? You want? Try. Eat. On board,
a wealth of Tyrian powder casks, fancied jars
of honey and ink, pelts wrapped around fine glass,
sacks of rich textiles. A galley market of trinkets.
In the gloam, they lit lanterns and bartered

into the glinting night—timber, now, slaves and purple dye.
Sons and daughters beheld the brackish currents,
seething tides, shared their bearers sea-love
and hand-me-down trade of almond and candlenut crates—
generations of skin steeped in seed oils. It began
in their children’s children’s children, with small splotches

and sores that bled over their hands. In a century,
cabin-resting mates woke to coughing, thickened tongues.
With each touch, the mottled rash ripened
worse than before. Mangled breath, fainting, gasping—
a mariner who split the woody cases was struck
by the gods, itching and coughing

until they pruned the very breath from him. Oars slogged
them homebound. They sought holy men, made offerings,
but the ivory fishhooks and salted meat could not
bleach their pores clean. The marked people—like their alphabet—
scattered into the wind, upon the whole earth face,
the stem of misery: nameless, without vowels.

Cover Art accepted for Pennsylvania English

2009-04-04T09:50:00.005+13:00

Two pieces of my artwork were selected for the cover of Pennsylvania English, the literary magazine out of Penn State.

"Bear It Away" Silver Gelatin Print. April 2008.

"Duck Season" Kinetic Sculpture, Various Materials. May 2008.

Poem Published in New Delta Review

2009-04-04T09:47:00.003+13:00

Fidel Castro visits a Frat Party

He stood shifting on the balls of his heels and gawked
at the large cluster of girls dancing in the strobing flash.
He fingered the bowl of corn chips, and brought
the crunchy flakes to an open palm, gathering them

like antique buttons—one for each year without a baptism.
The brothers rattled in their corner, picked off
dancers like gangsterismos—stereo and sound system
firing beats. Lushes and first-years swelled into a frenzy

of bodies tailgating each other and touching,
hands slinking for the edge of fabric, for a nude
pulse. And what would happen if he shouldered these
crooks and bangles home? He ate quietly, stayed away

from the rum and drank the Jungle juice. The boys
amused him, the flare with which they struck
was foul and gaping and something he almost
remembered. Then, revisiting the chips,

he divvied piles—ones that resembled fried ship’s sails,
palm fronds, two or three ripened like lotus petals,
the Virgin Mother—he reappraised hunger, satisfaction.
On the little island of the house’s back porch, the seniors

smoked cigars their fathers had given them
for Christmas, cigars their fathers boxed and only opened
on payday and Sundays: could he credit the raspy taste
to poor hands and bellies tilling and shucking the fields?

He saw the brothers’ roost as the Sierra Maestra,
a scuttled camp built on jutted ground. The muling farmhands,
so much akin to his college days. He crossed the grubby floor
and went into the bathroom, smashed, staring into the mirror.

Was the cake of soap a wickless candle, a clean moon?
He knew just what the humdrum trinket was without words,
and pocketed it for his return, to remind the sleepless,
the bald, the faithful, himself, when to tidy the mess.

USS Skagit Reunion

2008-09-30T09:24:00.006+13:00

G. Kenneth Munro and Bill Munro

Artifacts, 1.

Artifacts, 2.

USS Skagit Reunion: Two Bells

…for the memory of our departed… spoken word

can and should be… the bond that exists…

Marriott West, St. Louis, MO

September 13, 2008

The Reunion Association has a hospitality room

reserved on the first floor, and this is where I make my entrance,

table with my grandfather and father who have started without me,

who arrived a day earlier,

before I could drive out to join them.

I am here as a witness. I am here to mix drinks and help

my grandfather back to the hotel room. To eat and drink on someone else.

My father replaced my grandmother as a travel companion,

after she passed away. I am here to be proud

and greet and show for what has been lost, what is afforded and what will be.

Reunion tapes are wonking loud to soft to loud again

from the Marriot borrowed television/VHS.

This is how I meet Shotgun Red and Skeeter: through the tapes.

In the lounge where everyone is drinking and spinning war yarns,

there exists a clear divide between the Plank Owners and

Vietnam era sailors, the wives and aged navy boys.

I can pick out my grandfather’s generation. I can wade through

and discern from the age spots, as markers.

One with heavy lens glasses.

One with a thumb like the head of a railroad spike.

Ken Munro served with my grandfather, drove to St. Louis all the way

from Ontario, Canada. He’s brought his brother, Bill, with him

to every reunion he’s been to, although he was only on the Skagit

for a half hour, to visit.

Libby and Jerry introduce themselves on the screen.

After turning down the volume on the television, Millie comes over

to meet me, to let me know I was my grandmother’s favorite, that she misses

her friend, can see the family likeness in my neat eyebrows.

It was a fucking pleasure cruise, Ken assured me and took swigs

from his beer can, those younger shits were on vacation in the sixties.

Ship’s hull stretching the canal locks in Panama,

the troop load in Manila, the cargo and roost of landing crafts

towed and left, its hold drained and filled again with enlisted men.

Ken and his brother, Bill, told me the Vietnam sailors couldn’t know

the worth of a return trip.

There were three brothers at war’s open. Detroit born, seven years

raised in the states. When depression struck and rolled across,

the brothers were packed up past the north border,

to Fitzroy Harbour, their parents’ foreign homestead.

And though Canada was still young to join the fighting,

these three brothers wandered where they could, to pitch in.

This whole country is full of crap beer. So cans of Labatt Blue

were dealt to the table, my grandfather and father and me,

these brothers sharing between them a single cup.

Bill—the middle one—said he’d always been the handsomest,

that Ken was both the youngest and luckiest. He said, James,

the oldest brother, the one they looked up to, never lived to see

his twenty-first birthday.

Ken said he wanted to let me in on what beer really tasted like.

Drink up, he said. It’s the closest thing to being good, here.

The only thing these younger shits remember is a pleasure cruise.

Bill isn’t quite wistful, recalling his brother, Jim—

a flight pathfinder whose body was never found.

This idea is disparate from anything I’ve come to know.

The view from his and his brother’s hotel room

is of stacks and vents atop the kitchen facility.

I’m shy as to why he’s brought me up, because we’ve only just met,

and it’s not even that he served with my grandfather

on ship—Ken is the one who did that—

but our brief meeting hasn’t halted him from storytelling or confessing

or his wanting to educate me on a bottle of scotch

he brought with him.

Fill the glass as you wish. He pulls out the single-malt.

There occurs to me that there has been no act of reverence like this,

no chalice in church venerated as this hotel water glass.

I’ve got the logbook, the last few minutes before he dropped in Berlin.

There are no official words to this music.

A banquet and hired barbershop chorus ended the reunion activities.

My grandfather explained to me that it was voted on,

five or so years before, whether or not retired shipmen and wives

had to dress up for it, or if pressed slacks and loafers were enough—

no neck ties—and it was passed almost unanimously.

The verdict didn’t stop some from dressing to the nines.

You’ve been here for the best entertainment, my grandfather

nudging me while the on-stage group chanted, “Anchors Aweigh.”

Bill and Ken seated at the table in front of ours; the younger one

sporting a blue and green plaid suit with family Coat of Arms

patched on breast pocket, his superior wearing Texas Tie with Navy tack.

We stood to say our goodbyes once the spare forks and plates were cleared.

In between hugging ladies who knew my grandmother

and handshakes with old sailors, I got a good view of the Munros

all decorated—antiquated and odd—and understood I needed

a photograph of them. But this thought wasn’t buried in how they were dressed.

I wanted their picture, the way my father and I watched and rewound

reunion tapes, to remember the sound of my dead grandmother.

There is no use sleeping in the hotel room.

My grandfather wracks his body and gurgles under his breath.

He jerks his sheets out of place and whimpers in a way

I think he is muttering something.

In the other hotel bed, my father slips little snores,

snugs the comforter tighter around him as the night draws on.

And in my listening, I think I can hear a conversation

between the two, words spoken in sleep—maybe a name or date.

In tides, the exchange quiets and I can’t hear my grandfather

breathing—I focus in the dark, to notice his covers fluttering,

to get the slightest wisp of air—but the murmur and wheezing

comes back again, and the room fills.

I’m not ready for sleep.

I’m not ready to remember his breathing.

The Coop Project (In Progress)

2008-07-24T15:59:00.008+12:00

Each year the trees have claimed a bit more. The small winter snows have molded the roofing timbers and dropped the long beams with years of their weight. At one time, the sliver of grass between the coop and farm road was a landing strip for the land owner's single engine plane; at another time--as I imagine--people worked in there, farm workers or farmers lived in its industrial, fowl stained rooms. Locals made their money and baked their bread with what was earned or sold--the chickens' eggs carefully plucked and crated for sale at the community market.

Dog houses built and left within, alongside plastic bowling pins and night-lights. Box springs and driveway sealer hidden away, dusted with foliage and dirt and decades of uselessness. And under each layer of ware is someone's refuse. Below the rotted shingles and dropped ceiling joists are the remnants of what could have or actually happened therein.

It's the obscurity and strangeness of how I found these items together. It's a story that isn't too uncommon for the area.

The Mt. Carmel Festival Project

2008-07-21T16:58:00.004+12:00

My mother and I had hoped to get in and out early. And when we found that it only came to life after six in the evening, we decided to wait and make the trek over to the fairgrounds with family who lived in the area. The little girl—Alyssa—was no relation to me, but she went from my mother to her father, odd cousins and family friends, and then (finally) me and took my hand as a guide to help her through the crowd. I picked her up and carried her for a good long while; I watched her and waved—though she lost sight of me on the carnival swings—as she came by on each pass of the traveling ride. The attractions and vendors were only in town for a limited engagement, and the masses only aware of it for one week of their summer, but the fair food and fair goers and rides were something I walked away with; like the cheap, stuffed snake I found by the dunk tank—mass produced, flawed and easily forgotten, something like I’d already lost but never quite treasured until the right moment.

The Woodrow Jefferson Project

2008-05-09T02:45:00.008+12:00

Lives are born in places like the waiting line of department stores. People waiting for their number to be pulled in the deli line take on a more physical shape and existence when they talk about Sunday’s game and the fact they can’t get enough of a particular sharp cheddar cheese, or when waiting for the first available table at the Olive Garden as they mention the time their young nephew soiled himself at his classmate’s birthday party. When these stories are uncovered, innocent unknown people around us suddenly have third cousins and brothers and stepmothers, and so on—people suddenly appear from nowhere, around us, among us.

The Woodrow Jefferson Project is a voyeuristic experiment in recording these relationships and lives that we create and establish. It asks, “What would happen if I found something from someone, and followed it back to its home? Who would be there?” It begins with a thrift store bible filled with receipts and stationary and funerary documents and someone’s personal paperwork for their life. It is the act of looking up every name on every piece of paper, it is going to the County Courthouse to find every record on this family, it is picking through their garbage (at night) to see who these shadows really belong to. It is a project driven by how uncomfortably close anyone can get to a past through the remnants and wake we leave, and how fictionalized and distant our relations really are, to show how many truths and fictions we can get from any little dealings we have and the complexity of human interaction as a whole.

Burlington Best Thrift/The Holy Bible:
It was (quite possibly) the largest bible I’d ever seen, with a stash of yellowed receipts and bits of legal pad peeking from between the pages, with only one thing penned in—anywhere—in the beginning. Woodrow Jefferson. On a slip of lined paper, his handwritten name had a crippled look to it, which reminded me of my great grandfather.

Maple Ave./The Frame and Print:
I researched the street numbers on each stationary stub; I parked and sat in the woods across from every Jefferson address in the city of Reidsville and Caswell County, to catch a family glimpse. Once I read his obituary, I found the Maple Avenue house, a dumpster partly on Mr. Jefferson’s lawn, and a nearby, gutted street shop. Sifting through the leftovers, I found a print peeling away, finally exposing a person’s shoe, in the corner, underneath.

Caswell County Register of Deeds/The 1866 Archive Bible:
The red, plastic-covered catalogues—held in the vault—had every family member, their related land deeds, marriage certificates, birth and death records. I paid twenty-five cents per page I copied; I stole an antique bible that I found below the nineteen sixty-nine notarized court case testimonies. On scrap pages, Mr. Jefferson matched every relative I uncovered with a scribbled name and phone number as their living testament.

Pentecostal Holiness Church/The Umbrella:
From the pile of business cards in the bible pages, I figured his car was in poor shape; from the appointment cards and optometrist bills, I could tell his eyes were failing him. But the most personal thing, for me, to have discovered was the death record for his infant daughter, who never lived to see a birth certificate. I wonder how these things affected him come Sunday; I mull over if he ever used the communal umbrellas outside his church—the give and take.

Wilkerson Funeral Home/ The Far Out New Testament:
I couldn’t find a timeline for when any of this was happening, or which one came first, his sister’s death or the paperwork he filled out for his own passing. Either way, he had the arrangements laid out as if it were a living room, as if his funeral were like moving furniture into a new home.

Assembly of God Cemetery/The Cemetery Flowers:
The night prior to my cemetery visit, a heavy rain had come through—strong winds tossing over small wreaths and angel statuettes. At the back corner, the roadside corner, of the graveyard was the Jefferson family plot (Woodrow tucked in front of his parents and beside his late wife). Once I studied what I’d come there for, I noticed all of the gravestones were back-splashed with red clay; I noted that bouquets of cemetery flowers doted the lot’s vacant end, no longer belonging to any one person.

Contribution to the "Omniscience" Exhibition

2007-10-28T14:58:00.004+13:00

Close-Up of Cyanotype on Flannel

One of the latest exhibition to visit the Arts West Gallery in Elon, NC, was the "Omniscience" Exhibition. The exhibition was a series of paintings and drawings from the featured artist reproducing and eventually evolving the a chosen photograph from a National Geographic.

The series was an exploration in appropriation and reproduction. It explored the artistic process of how an artist represents something, the procedure that an individual must manipulate and incur when creating an "original" piece of artwork. (I am not saying I completely understand this exploration, but these descriptions above--of the exhibit--are my own and my understanding of this work.)

One of the most interesting features of this show was that other artists were given the original photograph and asked to contribute interpretations and workings. Whether or not I can fully indulge the scope of what was being worked at, I can discuss the process I encountered.

As an overall idea, I have really wrapped myself up in the idea that Black and White photography has a world of induced fiction (thoughts via John Hilliard, British Conceptual Photographer).

Book Art: In The Year Of The Frog

2007-10-20T19:31:00.002+13:00

Early Photography

2007-10-19T18:44:00.005+13:00

Curtis Davis, November 2006

Mark Sr., November 2005

Big Will Richardson, 4 July 2007

Self-Portrait, September 2007

Paul, The Vietnam Vet, October 2006

2007-10-19T17:42:00.000+13:00

so here it is, my first real finger print on this blogspot.

the artist statement will change, the cv/resume will grow;
the poetry and photographs will continue to add up.

what will it all do? what will it try to capture?
well, this is how you'll see it work, this is what you'll see in common
with all of my artwork: the people.

i write poetry about the people i come across--the lives
and messes and pieces each one stirs and leaves, the myth
and fact that swirls, the dialogue that is played between
how i/we live and the community i/we exist in. the photographs
function in much the same way--become another type
of imaginative text that has an induced fiction, as well as
pertinent documentation of every ringing ebb and facet of our society.

all of the posts will be poetry and photography--together,
or the occasional thought. but then again (now that i think
about it) my art and writing is only as good as your opinion--
hell, i've always thought that art is made for viewers, and poetry
for readers...so hopefully i'll find the intermittent remark.

so: view, read, talk to me.