As per usual, the summer heat wave and I do our best to put up with one another, giving each other the much-needed space we require sweating through the swollen furniture of embraced pain. I sit next to the air conditioner in my bedroom and watch television until my breathing slows and I can feel …
The Friend Display
My therapist says I remind others of what they want and believe they can’t have, so they deny my true self, in other words, my existence, to avoid feeling insecure and nonexistent themselves, and I tell her maybe I’m just an acquired taste, but that she’s right, maybe with my generous work/life balance, and single, …
Paraprofessional Tonglen
In the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, translated as “giving and taking,” the meditator replaces himself with others, real or imagined, by first identifying others and himself as Buddha, then breathing in suffering, with the intention of transmuting it into all the good things he wants for himself, which he’ll next give to his community on …
I’m Trying to Stop These Kids
I’m trying to stop these kids from killing each other in their backwards way of proving to themselves they are not worthy of love, trying to stop them from stealing each other’s food they think should have been theirs, from walking off grounds to practice running away from home, from playing baseball next to first-floor …
I Want Boredom to Feel Like a Trip
I guess I put intimacy before frivolity. I’ve always been like that. There’s this picture of my grandparents holding me in their backyard by the blueberry bushes when I was like 1, and they are the happiest people on Earth, and the look on my baby face resembles that of a judge having just heard …
Two Lives
No matter how quiet I was, I could never shut up inside. I liked being stoic, and waiting patiently for the right words to build up and blow off the top of my imagination, but like a teenager who won’t zip it and has to spout off about every little thing, spuming stream of consciousness …
I Can Find a Blanket’s Worth
I was going to say that one of the things I find most interesting is how the harder you hold onto things, the more swiftly they escape you, you know, something paradoxical and playful like that. But then I remembered I can find a blanket’s worth of comfort in a bucket-full of artery-hardening cheese, can …
I Liked Being
The mythological death daemon rising from my consciousness and laughing maniacally, the way my father did in his sleep some nights I also couldn’t sleep because I heard a creature at the foot of my bed breathing as if to say your life is mine when I say it is, stands at the crosswalk, waiting …
Brave
I used to worry about the fact that, because I chose not to drive, and by the time I was 35 everyone in my immediate family had either died, moved on, or been tactfully estranged for safety reasons, almost everyone my age I knew, or could know, who was trying to build and take care …
Images
The brain was having difficulty managing all the input and was in danger of exploding. “Slow down the images,” the doctor said. The assistant fiddled with the dials and said, “They’ve been slowed to one image per second.” “Mr. Stan, I’m going to need you to increase retrieval speed to three memories per second,” the …
The Sitter
I’d awoken in an unfamiliar room with a woman sitting on my lap, and I didn’t want to know who or why. It felt so good to be pressed into the chair and to feel a soft weight on top of me. What to do? I looked up to see the most beautiful woman I’ve …
Comatose
Often, in the morning before work, I’ll sit in my chair, and a part of me will start to feel like it’s fading away. I can feel a kind of comatose coming on, and I worry I’ll either bite my tongue off in a seizure-like middle place between sleep and waking, or just straight out …
The Mallard Lover
The soon to be ex-husband never came back. Priscilla and I lived a long and happy life at the house on Willow Lane. Little Josh grew up and got a job at the local Walmart as a manager. And Priscilla and I had a lot of fun over the years. She was a really great …
Pepper
I remember walking up to the fence and how Pepper would see me approach and come running over to lick my hands and look into my huge, brown, watery eyes. I fed him handfuls of hay they put out for us just over there. How simple and beautiful that was. I felt so glad about …
Pileated Woodpecker
It bores into the tree like how I’d imagine a miner from the gold rush with gold fever picking at a wall in a gold mine after seeing his more prosperous future flashing in some rock, like a seasoned boxer just past his prime, picking his shots at a young fighter who mistakenly thinks dancing …
Betrayal
I wake enraged, at the behest of my subconscious thinking of a crush kissing a best friend, then looking at me as if to say, you had your chance, and you blew it, even though I barely know this person, and I actually initiated taking things to the next level too many times to feel …
Crane Fly
When my father told me the adult crane fly, which looks like a mosquito on steroids, can’t suck the blood of humans, he affirmed my repeated life lesson that even though life can appear to want to swallow you sometimes through its long, needle-pointed attempt at healing you without telling you, it’s not always looking …
Flamingo Watching
Most of the flamingos had fallen over onto their other leg, once or twice, because of the wind, and one by one, they were lost to crocodiles. “It’s not usually like this,” I said. “Agree, number 237. We can usually stand on one leg for hours, and must, if our nervous systems are going to …
Barking Up My Man Tree
The time my father taught me to use birch bark as a firestarter, I thought he was magic in the way he knew how to make a fire rise from something so seemingly unwanted by the birch tree it fell from, you’d think he was a master of woodland alchemy. This secret knowledge I passed …
Crankshaft
In keeping with my National Poetry Month ritual of blindly choosing a random word from the dictionary to riff a poem off of, I read the definition for “crankshaft,” and realize I don’t really understand what one is or how one works. Like eating canned peas that always make me gag a little, I search …
My Poety Place 
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