I. At some point, it became irrelevant to teach little boys how to tie a horse’s harness to a tree after a morning ride as it will become irrelevant, yet possibly charming to tell analog time, and write in cursive, and develop 35 mm film (these things yet in my lifetime). There was, there will … More In Dreaming Stray
At Linneman’s RiverWest with McKenzie, my firstborn, who is somehow of age, beautiful, and strong, despite it all – we’re just one drink in, waiting for her boyfriend Zach to play, when I hit the ladies’ room — “I’m comin’ out!” the lady in the half-open stall shouts and so I pee behind the imperfectly … More Linneman’s
The end of summer this year is like a personal assault like a slap from a wet leaf, the leaves fluttering down and the colors just turning and sun setting less and less far north and the mist on the river the acorns landing like a shot on the deck and the yellow school buses … More August
And shining in the green field As though they are just-painted models In someone’s miniature world, Set just So as We fly down 577 while Sun and rain leapfrog over each other, Empty houses, fallow fields, A woman pulling weeds In a rectangular patch Reclaimed from the wild, Destined for the wild In 40 years … More Black Horses Wet
I am drunk on this new summer twilight, the world’s wash is golden-hued burdens liberally poured, and so I will roll in the fields where the corn is laid out in straight, sober lines, the light Creeping between them like water rising slow – I will lick the tree trunks and the underside of leaves … More One For the Road
i. Porterfield Elementary jutted like a brick mole on the inside bicep of Highway E, just down from where Roberta’s dad sold tractors to the flannelled German, Norwegian, and Polish farmers digging up the rocky soil around us. Here I would learn subtraction from zero, borrowing a ten from the neighbor number like … More Subtext
There is a man built like a hay bale in the row in front of me, a blue flannel shirt, he comes in alone, jams his long legs behind the seat in front of him, and much like a bale of hay, he speaks to no one but stays hours and hours to have … More At the Nick Offerman Book Reading Event In Milwaukee
Brown beer bottle clots spot Winter’s arterial ditches; He coughs up litter – golden bow from a Christmas wreath, a decaying newspaper fat with ads. A dead deer is suspended in the cold water at the edge of the forest, glassy eyed – a Russian Tsar, preserved; Winter clings to the brown land, a lover … More Folding Winter
Up, as the sun stretches lazily across the unmade bed of the Midwest and taps the Pacific shore, rousting the shore birds, up before they planned, before coffee, before mirror, up before their war paint and fences, they come out with leashes, wrinkled pajama pants, and flip flops that softly slap and whisper sleepy recognition … More Dog Walkers in Manhattan Beach
This poet pinned behind his ’63 Smith Corona at the art fair; he tilts his hat and waits for you To come, to ask him to free this poem not yet written, the one now held hostage inchoate in the fractal web of ether- He’ll lure it onto the page with whispers and worn keys … More Catch and Release
Halfway North 