Category: publications
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New poem in Hanging Loose: “Ekphrasis on a City Sidewalk”
This poem began life as the alt text on a picture I posted to Twitter back before Twitter turned evil. After I wrote the alt text, I realized that the alt text applied to itself and not just the picture and with a bit of editing turned into the poem that was published in Hanging Loose. …
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New poem: Corpse in the mirror
Whenever I write an 8-line poem, I find myself wondering if it can be turned into a pantoum, a poetic form which takes 8-lines of poetry and twists them into something else. As a sort of deterministic randomizer, this sort of thing felt like a good fit for the Dada issue of Exacting Clam and the…
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“The boy who loved music”: The story behind the story
My latest publication is a piece that began life as a CNF essay but turned into fiction because real life is too complicated to convey truth as well as fiction. Like the titular character of the story, I am losing my hearing to otosclerosis, but unlike that character, I’m nowhere near as good of a…
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“Elijah’s Funeral”: The story behind the story
I worked a long time on this story to make sure I got it absolutely right. I think maybe I did. The setting of the story is completely real. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker, Hennessy House and the Hippie Kitchen are all real places/institutions in Skid Row and Boyle Heights and were where I spent…
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Three new poems: Jubilate Mammonæ, Museum of Broken Hearts and Carmen Philomelaicum
I have three poems in the Autumn 2025 issue (Volume 51, Number 2) of California Quarterly: Museum of Broken Hearts Jubilate Mammonæ Carmen Philomelaicum The last is a translation of a Latin poem by Eusebius of Toledo, my first published translation.¹ I had read somewhere once that translating poems was an important part of the…
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New poem: Chicago Sonnet #42
Another poem from my Chicago Sonnets sequence is out in the debut issue of Big Score Lit. Despite being #42, it’s actually the first poem in the sequence and the one that inspired the project. There used to be a newsstand near the Adams station of the “L” in the loop and I was always intrigued…
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New poem: Parrotland
My poem Parrotland was just published at Dodging the Rain. Inspired by this Dinosaur Comics, I found myself wondering what America would be like if it were Parrotland and came up with the poem that I wrote.
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New poem: #66
This was one of those rare poems that is almost identical to the first hand-written draft (the only change was renaming Jimmy Two-dogs to Mikey Two-dogs). It’s a bit of a a tribute to the vanished world of the Chicago outfit, overly romanticized, sure. They were, after all, violent thugs, but at least they wore…
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New poem: Chicago Sonnet #26
My poem Chicago Sonnet #26 is out in the newest issue of Rat’s Ass Review. This is a rare bit of reported poetry in that I went out and talked briefly to one of the people in a homeless encampment (not the one that’s in the poem though) wondering how he ended up living in…