RT S2

These are two unrelated pieces, the second is from one of the prompts.   Thursday It’s Thursday and all I can think is I can’t wait to have an excuse to take a nap. Dreams of the dead are invading my slumber and when I wake, I can’t tell if I’ve slept. It’s...

Ghazal for my ghosts Gone to ground, my father’s ghost. Poof! Sticks around, my mother’s ghost. Almost. Poof! Oregon raised, climbing harsh desert buttes, she died along the southern Gulf Coast. Poof! She never loved the hot-humid, southern air. She longed for stormy...

Janie stops at DQ to pick up an ice-cream cake for her big brother, but it won’t fit in the cooler, even though she brought the large one. She puts the cake on her son’s lap instead and cranks the car’s AC. Her son is humming which makes her daughter scream and cover...

i refuse to be damned by this transience i will etch these shallow words with the hammer-kiss of poetry flowing from my brittle broken fingertips against this thin digital screen i will whisper-sing these morning psalms over the baying nephews in the room above...

The background voice. Click-a-tea-lee-counter of that endless chatter. Just an inward whisper, if you dare.  No se calma, Senor Tranquilo. Sdyq, friend. As the seed, we make sense of it. Do-si-do. Renew, rewrite. Past, present, presence. Tense no matter.  In the...

So... I received the Full Mood newsletter/call for submissions in my inbox. This month they proposed using a wordbank for poems or flash and only 24 hours to write/submit. I challenged myself to use ALL the words - for fun. Low stakes/expectations. And in SmokeLong...

We agree we're not pathetic. We buy furniture from Ikea and 8K televisions too big for our walls and sleep on mattresses resting on the floor. We joke about finding crazy stripper girlfriends. We Google how to write a good Tinder profile. We swipe right. We broaden...

Patti picked me up in her yellow Pacer, smelling like Momma’s Avon, wearing a turban with matching white gloves. She stopped at the Sonic Drive-In and ordered us Dr. Peppers and tater tots. Patti started kissing me, massaging my gums with her tongue, positioning my...