I felt as cold and empty as that body lying in that casket lined with fabric smooth and silky white, so different from what usually cradled my grandma’s skin, those soft, oft-washed dresses always topped with a floral apron.

There’s a song in my figurative head 
that I can’t shake loose. 
When I was a body, 
I did so many things with my... more

Here is your neighbor, blood forking from her nose, catching on her lip. 

05:05 am. My eyes open. A faint pearly blade of light squeezing past the blind. The distant metallic scrape of a moving tram.   

Portrait of Boy Refusing His Father's Music

The kids talk about Posh Spice. 
They sing Top 40... more

i’ve never attended a wedding and i wasn’t going to start now. my muscles were aching and my jaw was carrying a million bees, terrorizing the sides of my ears and throat. 

By the time the keys were in my eager teenaged hand, this car had been through some shit. Even ignoring the holes burned into the driver’s-side door, the missing half of the left side mirror, and the warped, discolored metal down the rest of the vehicle, the car was 13 years old already, and it looked it.

The cherry and strawberry seasons have passed; the apples are reddening. Only a few games remain. A Pit Spitter lays down a bunt, and the runner on third crashes in: a perfect suicide squeeze.

All that whimpers isn’t want.

One spring, I pulled
a reed from an oboe.
I planted it by a pond. 
Instantly, it... more

Morning gets angry and destroys a city
not New York, too obvious, but suppose
it’s on the coast. Suppose we’re the first to... more

There is snow that falls like a snake. It comes from the sky hissing and finds a bush to hide beneath. The leaves on the branches of the River... more

When the men came and dug us up to make way for the next crop, it took a sharp tug or two to free our limbs from where they were entangled with the earth

He’s soaked in sweat already and all he’s done is drive. He must know what they are here to find.

“Well, just be careful you don’t get caught with your pants down at the wrong kinda toilet.”

                             in response to a student evaluation for a science fiction class, Fall 2018

Student, it’s true—I prefer... more

Sometimes I want to take the industrial strength green Korean loofah, my sandpapery mitten, and just scrub at my face until huge chunks of flesh tear away and roll into brown fleshy noodles and fall to the floor. Afterwards, I won’t be bloody and flayed, all raw nerve endings and hamburger meat, I’ll be smooth as a peeled egg, soft and firm and pliant to the touch.

My heart is open. I can feel it. It’s never open. This can’t be a coincidence. This—

this poem starts on a tuesday in Kansas

a twister settles in. there is a twister dancing 
in the... more

My father’s disjointed rage has shocked him—I’ve seen that look before. He no longer draws from his beer even as Dad tilts his own way up.

Doris said she would pray for me because I was a kind person and her murdered great-nephew had also been named Kyle.

Cars fly by, the collective braking tantrum screech, the only speech the boy knows well enough. 

Goats and cows’ dreams have little pull yet. Cheese
is still cheese, piston driven milkers likely painful. The future
of... more

                                                           
                                         ... more

Her head is hung in anguish. She has opened the window. She is telling Satan to leave our house. She is upset with us.

I am no longer youthful, but not quite middle aged either. Traces of a younger me are present, though fading.

Read Kevin Mahler's Introduction to his ongoing 6-part "Portrait Series Paralleling Characters in HBO’s... more