Barrelhouse

(A) Left hand touches the right shoulder. Hand holds the shoulder Varying placement and strength of grasp. (B) Right hand touches the left shoulder. Note differences if differences exist. Replicate activity, note changes in brain wave, head pressure or jaw tension level. (C) Hand over but not touching skin. Maybe you are covered with subtle [...]

      This is also the year hallucinations started to get big. Before you could buy them real cheap down in the alleys behind the bodegas. A few bucks got you some sensual explosions, vertigo, dry-mouth. A momentary lapse, then you got on with your life. These new hallucinations, though, are incredibly involved. I [...]

This is the sixth post in an ongoing series reviewing pet books.  You can read the previous installments here.   The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood by Sy Montgomery (Ballantine 2005) What do you do when you have a potentially lucrative book deal but no book? Presumably, you start writing and [...]

Bifurcation I don’t want to part from you my smile is attached to your body and the kiss of the algae to the rock inside my years I carry a sunny and noisy child no one but you could draw him from his shell like the snail with a fine voice among the grass are [...]

Anxiety of Influence I fell asleep in the snow, and woke up in leaves. Cotillions of them were already out A limo glided by. There was a crane, too yellow, brand of KOMATSU. What does it mean, I asked. The leaf/sun interplay played on. I heard that sleep was a thing of healing so I [...]

Because I Have Given Birth As dilation of cervix    is the soul to blame shoot rubber bands   at eggs   like child’s play. This game’s  a guinea pig   made of Venetian glass or a Third Reich contraction    cast in bronze— the sperm of the future   the sperm of the past Western Civ’s Byzantine,   the Red Forest, [...]

They Were All Love Stories Even the ones that lasted a matter of minutes. The best are often a matter of a week. But at some point, having cherished the same novel (the one only known to the initiated), or having been intimate with the same album, by the same band, in the end, was [...]

Waterfront It smells like the sea. I’m staring at the skyline and the sunset hit the water through my phone. It looks like a mushroom cloud. I take a pic and send it to my mom. Some fuckhead brought his acoustic guitar. I took out my headphones so I could listen to nature and have [...]

Man Builds a Guitar I heard everything disappearing. I heard you, wind. And I heard you leaving—or wanting to expand like twin coke bottles missing the tiny worlds inside them. [insert noise of grease, a missing syllable’s tin hooks, traction]   The toy piano I can’t shake hear it? and beneath it the steady undifferentiated [...]

  In January of 1998, when we were twenty-four years old, my friend John Ringhofer and I sat on my bedroom floor with a pair of guitars, a Yamaha keyboard, and a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe storybook cassette, and began to write songs for what would one day become one of Chattanooga, [...]