Poems

Backseat TheologyBoom chacka boom chackkaBoom chacka Bow wow She’s got a cross tattooed between her shoulder bladesand a mouth that could make a preacher forget his own name—picked me up outside a dive bar in a car that smells like cheap tequila,cheaper perfume, and zero shame.Says you look like trouble,I say baby, you look like […]

Ashes in the Kitchen Sink The lasagna she never finished still haunts the TupperwareHer hair on the pillow, her scent on the robe, like she’s just le getting thereThe mail still comes with her title, like the world didn’t get the newsAnd I water her plants like a ritual I’m too numb to refuseI left

Backseat HoneyShe rolled in from nowhere with a carbonated grin,a history of winning the hard way.Switchblade vocabulary and cut-off ambitions,running through me like a holiday. Slapped her particular brand on my self-regardand peeled the whole thing off for sport.She don’t kiss slow —she deploys contact like a hit-and-run on a short court. Her perfume carries

Ashes In The Rain, Fukushima, Japan The bones of the coast still crack at night,Empty windows stare from salt-bleached homes,Rainfall weeps in radioactive patterns,Mothers whisper to silence, counting days by ghosts.Children’s laughter trapped in broken mirrors,Footprints fading, sunflowers shivering in dust,Once there were lanterns bobbing in the rice fields—Now they drift, memory embers, lost in

Artificial IntelligenceThey wrote the textbooks with erasers in their hands,scrubbing out the massacres, the unmarked desert sands,every conqueror a hero in the stories they still spinwhile the buried bones stay silent and the truth wears thin.Your grandfather believed it, passed it down like sacred law,never questioned why the enemy was always painted raw,never asked who

Another Year to Burn Flicked the lighter, candle stares,Another circle scratched in air.Crowd’s too loud to hear my age,But the ice in my drink reads every page. Ashtray full of old regrets,Boots still wet from chasing bets.Laughed too hard, slept too fast,A year gone down like a dirty glass. Some call this livin’,Some call it

Apathy Is Not the Opposite of LoveI want to be precise about this—imprecision is the easy out. It’s not the absence of the feeling,not the rerouting of caring into somewhere cold,not the deliberate withdrawal of the selffrom the proximity of you. It’s the overhaulof the mechanism that expresses it.The blown circuit.The demonstration gone quietwhile the

Ambition AdjacentI have the notebook.The notebook has the outline,written in the heat of the late-year prior —when the project had me smitten. The first three pages remain current,entirely applicable.The spine is cracked, the bookmark holds. My friend shipped hers on a completely ordinary day,announced it like weather,the actual product in its actual finished state —and

AmbushIt wasn’t at the funeral — I held it together, clean and pressed,shook hands and thanked the neighbors, kept it where I keep the rest,said the right words in the right order, kept my voice below the break,walked to my car and drove home steady for the other people’s sake. Four months later at a

Altars Made Of Drywall (Remastered) I grew up in wooden pews where the air smelled like dustand perfume and guilt, kneecaps bruised from kneeling on cheap red cushionswhile the choir tried to drown out what we really felt with all that polished noiseand practiced smiles,Watched the pastor grip the pulpit with righteous hands,voice shotgunning verses