A car I once had failed on me because the tires ate the exhaust pipe. After that, I had four wheels that coughed constantly, sometimes sputtering smoke into the air. Then the rearview mirrors inges…

feel like you’re left trying to change a flat tire alongside the highway to helter-skelter. Some Mondays leave you with a splinter stuck in your voice whenever you speak against the grain. Some are…

feel like you’re left trying to change a flat tire alongside the highway to helter-skelter. Some Mondays leave you with a splinter stuck in your voice whenever you speak against the grain. Some are…

a new Zapruder steadies his hand. History inhales as film frames roll, capturing modern life: surveillance fatigue and income inequality; work overload, constant urgency; anxiety, depression; uncer…

Along the road: speed traps, abandoned maps, and shadow-bruised mountains rising from adobe dust. Hellraisers, heartbreakers, and hot-rod Mustang cowboys hauling ass across wide-open West Texas fla…

Let’s begin by placing the alphabet in a single-file line alongside the spinning numbers. A leans against the gas pump, strains to recall a day when a pocketful of coins could buy a gallon’s worth.…

There’ll be days when your alarm clock gets lockjaw, when single socks file missing-partner reports, and you’re the prime suspect. Days when your forehead feels foreclosed, when emotions forget the…

I would endure costly legal battles, a thousand paper cuts of subpoenas. I would search every sock drawer smelling of tired excuses and the New York City subway in summer. I would let myself be hel…

Drivers of half-remembered nightmares rev at red lights, sparking new fears in old ears as newly escaped visionaries from an Alcatraz of all that jazz meditate on how to undeath a troubled world. M…

Go green. Green light, go. Green thumb deep digging in flowered earth. Greenhorn morning wet behind the ears. Green promise. Green renewal. Greenbacks riding cash cows in green-dawn calm. Green hor…

Alexander Fleming never drank with wounded poets wiping tears from the bar of unheard jazz. Sarah Breedlove never met Couch Potato Pete, whose gaming addiction was the stuff of record books and wou…

Gold-minted morning. Wishing penny morning. Morning healing that nail-in-the-foot blues. Morning soaring dharma-winged on a heart-jeweled tune. Warless and stormless morning. Sky breakfast served s…

I took you to the Museum of Almosts— displays of abandoned plans, unsent texts, a wing devoted to lives that diverged by one small choice. After that, we visited the Museum of Things Left in Cars O…

Falls on immigrants harassed and forced to leave this country. A troubled rain falls on Iran and its murdered children and innocents. Falls on lands scorched by wildfires and deforestation. On dino…

Cruising surveillance streets of drone-shadowed crows and bombed-out silence. Cruising advertising streets of pumped-up vitamins and quickly hacked miracles. Cruising political streets of rebranded…

The internet is overloading my dog with cat videos. I’m crushing on a book with no ending. My neighbor speaks Cro-Magnon; I speak ladybug. The electric company has shut off my libido. An albatross …

Endings ask to go first, but beginnings bolt to the front of the line. Endings insist that in a Tarantino-fractured storyverse, they can pass as new beginnings— or at least muscle into the middle. …

Logic cards me at the door of my brain, wondering if I have the right ID to enter my own thoughts. Either that, or I keep getting parking tickets when remaining stuck on one idea for too long. Some…

In sleep, my body assumes the shape of various Rorschach drawings. Psychology students from the local college stand over my bed, interpreting my appearance— one says I look like a butterfly. Anothe…

Pause. Reconsider. Reflect. Pump the brakes. Breathe. Reassess. Tread carefully. Weigh the risks. Exercise due diligence. Run a mile while taking it under advisement. Take a beat, slow your roll. L…

How long has it been since you’ve driven all night, windows down, radio up, and the broken white highway lines speeding by like a Morse code of joy and abandon? How long since you adopted the vocab…

atomic recombination, dark ages and formation of stars. Single-celled organisms, apes and humans. Belly buttons and lost buttons. Baby shoes, butterflies, dog houses and two-car garages. Arabesques…

an Olympic event for fusing random electric guitar parts into a cure for cancer? Or one for the best teenage prank calls?  Or for those who’ve emerged from puberty with the best war stories? O…

So there I am, standing next to Sitting Bull—elk-hide shirt and leggings, beaded moccasins, a small leather medicine pouch at his neck. I ask what he’s doing at the mall, of all places, Spencer’s G…

When I was a child, there was a time my mother, father, brother and I lived at the border of tranquility. Days we spent reading and rereading the pages of clouds as they changed meaning, the bright…

Wanderlust has carried me from the cradle to this place that is forty acres of death and empty forties scattered about. Here, tombstones know us by name, and starlight spills across rivers in searc…

Somewhere in the world is your doppelgänger— similar body, hair, scent. You stand beneath the same sun, dream similar dreams, wear an overcoat big enough for the two of you. In stories, you’ve lear…

Fatigued and battle weary, January’s cold, assaulted days have crossed into February. What this new month, and those that follow, will bring is anybody’s guess. The courage of those who take to the…

It follows us like a shadow, dragging its roots along—this garden. It’s there behind us in the coffee line, at our workstation, beside us when we’re looking in the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing our…

Life is a test, so please keep all personal belongings—phones, money, emergency contact information close at hand. Make sure you have a working pen, pencil, and camera as instructed. Feel free to o…

Less blood and bullets, more peace and promise. Moon, swell brighter. Sun, rise higher. With every breath and step, may we walk ahead of our wounds. The bullseyes on our hearts fall away. Our hurts…

I want to order a different 2026. One without four gunshot wounds and no pulse. One with more carefree streets and community gardens. Auroras and eclipses, meteor showers leaving mouths open in awe…

The sky above: a park filled with cloud benches, breeze swing sets, songbirds echoing playground’s blue dazzle. The world below: ash and collapse, shootings and protests, the autopsy of so many reg…

Somewhere there are wars, fistic lunatics who can’t stop battling goodness and grace. Somewhere far too many innocent people of color fit the profile of guilty upon sight. Somewhere fascism crossdr…

He’s the first son of tornadoes, larcenous and lascivious in his deathland dynasty. His unroyal court—liars and shysters, sycophants and secret police. His fork-tongued alphabet, cut with chaos and…

Don’t wanna prosper at the expense of others. Don’t wanna take my gratification from annihilation. Don’t wanna be a mouthpiece for war-mouthed ways. Don’t want our life song to be #1 with a bullet …

How will our future’s history read? What stories will our children tell their children? Streets thick with desperation and denial, recitations and incantations of revolution and execution. Too many…

That “Bohemian Rhapsody” was gonna be a six-minute rant about some guy who didn’t wanna get a job. That algebra and square roots without a calculator were a drag, but not as bad as puberty. That if…

Up and down the boulevard, there is pain, soul sickness, the heart-blind, and broken-haloed.  Wilted blades of grass, robbed of their green, are suffering.  Streetlights, whose final flic…

summer boombox glory is months away. skies hang heavy and lumbering, like a country jukebox with a smoker’s cough. the somber gray stains our eyes with a sad mascara that won’t stop running. yet no…

Who graffitied over the night stars painted on ceilings of our minds? Who taught the brides of daggers and broken glass to speak in languages of strangers depositing fortunes into fog banks along b…

Medicine the mad back to health. Make heartbreak a hammer, build a house to kitchen us back to comfort. A weapon is not the Constitution or Bible. Its ruptured rapture has no grasp of wisdom, philo…

When the mad-dog moon moans, when the mad-dog moon bites, better remove the fever before the end of night. Lover in your bed, enemy at the edge of town, better square your black-cat debts before th…

I got a night job proofreading clouds. After only one shift, I was amazed at how cacographic some clouds could be. One shaped as Belgrade spelled itself, Beauregard. Another that resembled a calend…

I am the son of the sun, a rising sun, a setting sun. I am the son of the one who climbs to the rooftop of a new moon and performs the dance of planet spin and star wobble. I am the son of a tombst…

growing up, my mama would say the house of confidence ain’t built at the corner of cutthroat and cowardice. she’d say fear and adversity can make good teachers, but you wouldn’t wanna be their perm…

Takes a fluid vocabulary to match rain’s freefall from the heavens into rivers and streams, onto farmlands and desert landscapes. Rain is liquid graffiti streaking buildings and freeway overpasses.…

Calling all poets and songbirds. Those that pray, not prey. All shopaholics at the Mall of Mercy. A Congress that actually engages in friendly congress. Calling all wildfires to take a chill pill. …

There’ll always be songbirds and saviors, corporations and cruelty, men more in love with money and their mirror reflection. Always amulets and talismans, potions and Ponzi schemes, a new wannabe d…

The dirty dishes of cockroaches and the dirty dishes of passing storm clouds. The chain-link fence surrounding stray dogs and the chain-link fence surrounding overly ambitious kisses. The revving e…