Da press secretary is deflecting
so many pertinent questions
dat you could almost visualize
da force field dat surrounds him
Da press secretary is deflecting
so many pertinent questions
dat you could almost visualize
da force field dat surrounds him
I emerge from ashes like beast
because it’s September something
& I haven’t smiled since January
since backstabbing amigas tried
to take me down since Notre Dame
we are
star-spangled
& we are
earning our stripes
About a week after it all happened, a friend of mine texted me. He said he needed to talk.
I’d known Chris since the late 90s, when I lived in Salt Lake City Utah. Chris now lives in Nevada, in Las Vegas with his boyfriend. It’s not really relevant but they broke up in January sometime over increasing tension in their household. Chris’ boyfriend hadn’t voted in the election. It wasn’t something Chris could let go.
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.