• EROTHANATOS Vol. 3, No. 3

    Just yesterday Erothanatos (from India) released its issue number 3 of volume 3, a collection of poets from several countries.  I was honored to have seven poems appear in this issue and you can find them here: https://www.erothanatos.com/v3i3n10 But if you don’t have the time, one of the included poems was: In a Prior Life…


  • WITH PEN IN HAND

    You never read the ultimate autobiography which doesn’t exist unless you live in an Oulipian world. You can write up to the moment Of your death, and we would, if begrudgingly, conceded the last moments incompleteness, but you cannot write a true and complete autobiography without falling into the recursive abyss where everything that you…


  • TRIANGULATION

    He says that foremost Mao Zedong was a poet, and knew that all poetry must at some level be political, must incite the reader to rebel against complacency. I say that Zhao Zhenkai wrote as Bei Dao as the ultimate act of rebellion, sacrificing his very identity. He says that I am anchored by the…


  • CITY LIGHTS

    It was a Tuesday in October or a Wednesday in March, hard to say which, but evening. We had taken a cab from the Hyatt Embarcadero or the Fairmont, it didn’t much matter, and sat in the Chinese restaurant on the edge of Chinatown, or a pasta and seafood joint in North Beach, and you…


  • REASON

    I write poems about Wisconsin because I love the sound of the word cheese.


  • REAL TIME

    Reality is clearly something to be avoided to be dressed up in tattery, tied in ribbons, perfumed, yet its fetid stench is always lurking in the background waiting to pierce your nostrils in an incautious moment until you retch and bring up the bile that marks the darker moments of your life, the kind that…


  • EARLY ARRIVAL

    Autumn came on hard today the drop in temperature not unexpected in these climes, but still unwanted, forcing the closing of windows. Still, as the afternoon faded, I shouted toward the window a reminder not to go gently into night to fight the soon approaching dark. The squirrel on the lawn outside the window stood,…


  • GOING

    Mingus             twisting  roiling                 blood of streets        child’s cry                         laughter of old men             s              w…


  • ACT IV

    He knew he should not have brought the gun. He hated guns, they served no purpose in his world of words. He wanted to look at it, to stare at it, really. He thought that if he did so he might be better able to write about the senselessness of the world in which he…


  • VLADIMIR

    Krevchinsky froze his ass off on the Siberian plain. The gray concrete box was traded for concrete gray skies, the whistle of the truncheon gives way to winter’s blasts. It was in many ways easier when the beatings came neatly marking the days dividing days between pain and exhaustion, all under the watchful eye of…