Color Study, or Ode to Discomfort

It was never safe for us—
always beneath the eye is blood;
and maybe a ferocious tongue
called

Lenore was at the cusp. I’m cusping, Percy, she rasped. Percy was unsure what to do about it. Press forward? Hang back?

I remember being young and small and barefoot on the concrete floor: look closely and see how the cicada shells vibrate as the Texas Hill Country winds sift in.

In jazz, woodshedding refers to the shed you sequester yourself in, as a young musician learning the craft, a private space to develop your own style, away from prying eyes or critical ears.

i trapped pete wentz
in a pastoral landscape

Married twenty years today, Heather and Vic play that game.

It’s the first time I remember feeling that superstrong tween indignation that he’d taken something that was supposed to be just mine.

They walked along the railroad somewhere in Atlanta on a cold and bitter night, the full moon above them like a yellow coin some unforgiving God had tossed far out into the galaxy. In the near

Every car passing by might house a backseat scout

There is a crawl space in my lover’s house that his wife and children don’t know about. He likes to sing into it when he’s drunk and he’s only drunk when he’s with me.

Were this place to close, or burn, or fall, in an earthquake, down.
Were it to flood or be bulldozed to make way for the gray &
unmusical slab of an apartment building. Were it to be

Nate and I were in a band together throughout high school — screamo with keyboards.

A city wide boil advisory is still out. Brain eating amoebas were detected in the tap.

I dreamed my brother gave his dog to a friend in New York
who could better care for him. we walked into the woods

behind the wintered swim club where the swan babies
held their bonfires. I was

If I’m going to be honest, my life has been running at something of a parallel to Husker Football for the last ten years, over which time I’ve tried to hack it as a musician, restaurateur, and writer.

Q-tips were her guilty pleasure. She loved the feel of them caressing her inner ear, reaching the itch she could otherwise not scratch. Even when there wasn’t a swish of water lodged within, she loved

A Flash Book Review of ‘50 Barn Poems’ and Brief Interview with Zac Smith

My mother once jumped off a boat into a swarm of jellyfish. Why did she think they would not sting?

We heard something Anglo, unhinged, too human. We’d been hoping for Shrimp killing Cow or Cow killing Shrimp, but it was you, Bitcha, flailing and teetering about in the night sky.

Sometimes, he gives me tips. Most of the time, it is this: “Take your time.”

I awoke no more than ten minutes ago and already so much has been consumed

Toward the end, when heart disease had already taken my father, and my mother was alone—which she found intolerable—her doctors felt she had dementia. But I knew that was not the case. She had always

She had us trade cardigans. She said it was an exercise in empathy. 

I used to write in circles. Starting in the center.