Kind editors Laura and Lorna over at Origami Journal have published a section of "Devin Wants To Make a Movie," a story from my upcoming collection Poison and Antidote. Be afraid, be very afraid--and click on the picture to read it.

A Poem

Debra did a really good

Job, in Mantua, on her pizza.

Frozen bits of Lambrusco

rained on the foreign hats

of baroque theaters, streets

of blunt nails, rocks for

revolutionary throwing.

We had aperativo instead

for the Ducal Palaces are

now always open to the public eye.

1/3/2014

Mantua

My first ever Haiku

Sudden thunderstorm

scurrying shoppers — plastic,

'cept a wet baguette

Filial Piety

A syphilitic fighter pilot at once decorated the fuselage with his fingerprints, drained of both fluids and fuel where it would never rain. Sylvan landscapes of soft tiles painted in a foxhole under the fo’cs’le—it will never fly again. Slippery slopped down on all this sand—your Corsair lay like a silver fossil, remnant of an age of legless giants—smooth as a missile and phallic as a beached whale. Listen: the slipstream will no longer flip you, neither flaccid nor dripping; this is the end of your flying. The fling is flung, and all your flotsam already littering the veranda, is done. All good things... Or are they?

Then the fleas, Norwegian wood—this bird hastens to lift off. Smiles line up in the silo, sensory memories of skies once sewn upon your flight jacket. World War II, Korea, and home—you old philanderer, fixed, you old fossil, flummoxed by all love, my father. You always knew, you always flew away.

1/9/2014

Florence

Apology

Asked to write something about myself as a writer by the Creative People in Florence group I came up with this apology of sorts. It explains my history as a writer and why I chose to self publish.

(It also includes some visual/textual collaborations with photographer Debra A Zeller.)

Casta Diva (chant)

Baby Dionysus

Basket

A kanthoros for wine drinking

Beak

Beak

Beak

A fecund fuck

            Keeps coming back

Tobacco

A kanthoros for wine drinking

A satyr, erect

Correct

Train wreck

A fecund fuck

Forever coming back

1/3/2014

Mantova

TWO TOADS

(Ode: a poem in praise of something.

Toad: a poem in blame of something.)

The Loser Without a Face  (for Joseph Campbell)

Others were in charge

of heaven, others claimed

the day, the night, the fruits

of all those endless shifts

of slavery.

You rose at dawn, went

down to work, and worked

and worked and worked

and, once in a while,

you got a day off

to wash your children’s diapers

to satisfy your spouse

to clean the toilets, the kitchen

and every other room in the bank’s house.

You were hardly a hero.

You lived for too many years.

You died and were almost immediately

obliterated by time.

True story.

Atlas Humbled (for Ayn Rand)

The selfish never

get what they want

‘cause no one likes

a brat.

            And mostly ‘cause

we only want what

we can’t have

anyway—

                       Love,

respect—a way

to pass the time

without worrying, too much,

how bad it’s gonna hurt.

2/4/2014

Florence