Hi, other white guys. I know that we see each other all the time, but we don’t really talk about stuff, you know? Rock music, maybe, football, sure, but not serious stuff. I know that that sounds weird or like I’m going to hassle you, but it looks like a lot of us have made a mistake. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a hard time about slavery. That was bad, for sure, but it’s not really my place to talk to you about that.
When a group of young men
surround you outside of the bar
and it's late and you're alone
don't react when they call you
a faggot
My mirror could have lied
but it chose not to.
I asked it sweetly, slowly
to change for me
to change me
into something free and vital,
pale and careless,
white as snow and unburdened song.
To take a knee through history
takes bravery.
To stay down
when they came with the whips.
He was getting one fuck of a headache.
For a moment he thought she was going to say no more;
even allowed himself to hope this was so.
I love three people who voted for hate
there's no way to reconcile this ache
I have walked away from others, but
there are three people I love
who voted for hate
What was the first lie?
Do you remember?
Being told your neighbors
were bad?
your government bloated?
That your hair or your teeth
or your face was wrong?
I grew up in a house full of guys. Throughout most of my adolescence there were not a lot of moments where the finer points of being a female were taught. Instead I learned the not-so-subtle art of being a boy, like jumping fences, hopping apartment building rooftops, and learning how to take the pain of rough housing.
Here’s what the random word generator gave me: “copper, explain, ill-fated, truck, neat, unite, branch, educated, tenuous, hum, decisive, notice.” I was a detective working clues.
Waiting for Godot, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s two act play from the Theatre of the Absurd, is a quintessential primer to understanding politics under the Trump Administration.
I have to be honest. Even with a few dozen guns to my head, I don’t think I could choose just one decade for horror movies. If you ask me, it can’t be done, man.
There are decades that I like more than others. What I can’t do is choose the 70s over the 80s, or the 90s over the 60s. Or any decade over them all.
Pets and a garden work wonders as allies through transitions. I don’t mean large ones, like a death or a move or a birth, though I’m sure they’re good during those too, I mean quotidian ones to which you’d think you’d be able to adjust all by yourself, but in fact, without soft allies, you don’t.
Oracular the filtered light of oak
through her peignoir She comes to me as though
her spell was never broken I’m still twenty
I can smell those pungent oranges in the sun
The children appear from the edges. Their faces set. Their bodies are covered in iridescent powders that shimmer in hues that could only be seen in dreams. We have been gathered in the square to wait. Our kin have been gathered to watch. The children walk around us in a pack, sniffing, running towards us and back again to their circle. Worn, brown leather pouches hang around their necks, swaying with their movement.
I narrate to him that last night both partners
thought they’d given everything up for the other.
It was ugly. They didn’t get, they wouldn’t get,
what they’d hoped for. I editorialize
that I think rage is clichéd in marriage
after a decade and a half.
No one wanted to hang out with Janie anymore and I thought that was unfair. It could have been any number of things that turned the group off to her but in my book she was better than alright. Maybe I was being sentimental but Janie was one of ours and I wasn't ready to let her go.
There was a study done
to prove that men and women
have different brains
to prove, I suppose, that
women are from venus
and men are from mars,
that men want to fuck
and women want to marry
or some garbage like that
Look, I’ve been in and out of the newspaper business for going on a quarter of a century. I’m cool with that, I know I’m in a business going the way of coal-powered dodo birds, the telegraph, and professional jitterbuggers. If I’m the last one standing the day they stop rolling the presses, feel free to chisel it on my tombstone.
the drinking glass
you threw
across the room
shattered
against the wall
I had said
a wrong thing