Body Count
Body Count is a heavy metal band fronted by Ice-T. Twenty-one years after their founding they received a Grammy Award for the song “Bum Rush” which features lyrics such as “It’s all twisted, the game is bent / Still no clean water in Flint.” Between 1986-98 there were four Hollywood movies named Body Count. The highest audience score on Rotten… Read more →
Back in Iowa, Looking Out the Window at Rebekah’s Parents’ House
In the aching morning light, you see straight to the field of scrub and vines, and beyond it, to the run-down gate, half-closing the path to where the maple-sap drips as grapes deflate in the waning summer, and knapweeds, coarse but erect, rebel and push through the soil. Rebekah once told you that, as a child, she uprooted those pillars… Read more →
full landscape with no exit
I didn’t do it : the crisp light by itself mounted the statue and silence bleeds in my throat mauve-orchid the color of your eyes full mauve like a cathedral opens a secret door : stay on page so you could breathe but breathing is a flower with sharp teeth or stop thinking of me or break my bones and… Read more →
Lily
A lily of the valley walked in and said the world is doomed I didn’t know what to say I studied the lily of the valley and not knowing what to say I said why? money said the lily money for money’s sake also time blocks of time I offered her ice from my cup I had no money or… Read more →
Riddle
The joy shimmied out by years of spreadsheets daydreams that rust into a retirement buried by the silver spade, flicked out of a deck slick like an afternoon sweat. How can a monthly invoice slipped from an envelope, read aloud like an incantation, memorized like a riddle, throw the sky to the earth?

Holy Matrimony
Coin Shortage
There’s nothing greener than grass except the untended weeds, bristling, poking in a brittle way at the world around their envy. Except nothing’s green that’s not painted or plastic. It won’t rain. The grass is on edge. There’s no greed like the rooted seeds’ for water. I walk guarded among them like one accused. Like each passing day, the blades… Read more →

The Heroine in Bronze
Coal mining as loss-chasing
I don’t gamble much, but the mine struck me as casino- ish. Nobody ends up there accidently, there’s no windows, there’s no clocks, every last machine beeps and flashes, every last light’s strategically placed and in between it’s unsettling dark. I saw a bird underground once, and a mushroom under a beltline that dripped a chemical composition evidently nutritious enough… Read more →