A Poem Miasma
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Corvids are the largest passerines
May 9, 2020
We've made it through another mass of time, together in our separateness. Poetically and otherwise, here are some things that are getting me through. I hope...
New onions growing underground
March 21, 2020
It's been a while. Here we all are looking at our email. Everything is strange and I have the start of one of my own old never-quite-for-sure-completed poems...
A homonym for ghost
October 20, 2019
Three women stood on the low stage in the glass building one winter evening, bare trees lit behind them. The woman in the center would read some lines in...
Aloud again: GBOMA, Sept. 17, Promontory
September 10, 2019
I'm honored to have been selected for the third time as a semifinalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards. GBOMA is a fantastic event. It epitomizes...
Astrology is fake but poems are real
July 13, 2019
Astrology is fake (as the humorous astrology column on the dearly departed website the Hairpin always began) but Cancer season is here, which means my...
In the wet time, breathtaken
May 29, 2019
I have a new zine of poems that I'm proud and excited to share. Breathtaken is a series of eight poems about swimming pools, memory, family and identity. A...
Hi, Cold. I'm Dad.
March 27, 2019
It's not exactly a poem, but I'm delighted to present a new zine I created with the design help of my loving partner, my friend John Morrison, and my very...
You do not have to be good
January 19, 2019
If your social media circles are anything like mine they crumpled in grief this week at the death of Mary Oliver. People who professed themselves not to be...
We would try to imagine
December 26, 2018
Once there were world wars and that's where modernism came from, the horrors of war that were too much to present in a linear narrative or a classical form....
Wild kindnesses
October 29, 2018
When I was a teen trying to be punk rock, my boyfriend decorated the ceiling of his room with setlists from shows, and so I'd sit around making found poems...
When I was a child, I walked around with cameras for hands.
September 11, 2018
That subject line is the first line of a new poem I will be reading at the 25th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards, one week from today. Reciting at...
The plums and the car roof
August 9, 2018
It is the 21st century and my friends and I live on what we call "the bird hellsite." While Twitter has lots of strikes against it (primarily that they value...
Junk is letting go
June 21, 2018
I picked up a glorious junk drawer of a book-length poem at the library last month: Junk, by Tommy Pico. All in couplets, it covers the end of a...
The letter of the law
March 27, 2018
With the mendacity and misdirection involved in American politics, it's easy to lose track that a law, like a poem, is a thing made of words. Enforceable...
Your world doesn't make sense
February 2, 2018
Between Star Trek: Discovery, the comic series Saga, and a despondent postmortem revisiting of Ursula K. Le Guin, I've been on a huge science fiction tear...
Art urges voyages
December 10, 2017
The year that is drawing to a close was my tenth year in Chicago and the centenary of the great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Her poem "We Real Cool" is as...
Poems made of pieces of other poems
September 26, 2017
There are attention games I play with myself as I go from place to place. These are various strategies for attempting to notice my surroundings more, to...
A long history with hurt
August 15, 2017
It is a good week to read Danez Smith. I've been reading his frequently breathtaking collection [insert] boy. And reading the news moved me to revisit the...
James Joyce and being addressable
June 9, 2017
Sometimes a phrase from memory takes me by surprise. Some weeks ago I was walking across the Chicago River with my partner and a friend, talking about...
A real live ghost
January 18, 2017
I don't go in much for quantifying my behavior or experiences. Not for me the Fitbit, the Foursquare, the daily selfie. The one exception is my regularly...
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