Category: Gallimaufry
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June First
Let fall the words they spoke to you on nights rage struck your temples like lightning to an oak tree that went its whole life all those layers of rings not getting hit just to get hit. Let the wilderness consume your mind not because you need to simulate recklessness you, so calculated now what…
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Orphan Dryer Sheet
An missing orphan dryer sheet falls from the inside of my pant leg in the produce section by the apples. Solving little mysteries makes me smile.
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Landlines: One Reason the ’90s Were the Best Decade for Elementary School Romance
Chivalrous courtship, (in the elementary-school-aged-male sense of the word) isn’t dead, but it took a major hit during the latter half of the first decade of this millennium. It started when households began doing away with their home phones and choosing to exclusively use cellular phones. With that one decision, the family itself lost a…
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Top Score
Whenever I would get to see you, when it was our time, I felt I was stepping up to the challenge of an arcade pinball machine. Feeling below the cabinet for that hidden power switch, I’d seek you out. Reaching into my coat pocket for my busted burner phone and punching in the sequence of…
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An Evening Out in Fishtown, or the shabbily doctored-up bits of observation I typed into my phone on the evening of August 19, 2016.
Find no purpose here!—unless purpose can be distilled from the peculiarities of the sights and sounds of one man’s collection of lines taken down while pretending to send text messages during a summer evening out in an eclectic Philadelphia neighborhood. Frankfort Hall. Beer garden. Biergarten? I’ll settle on the former. This is a haven…
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Diving Sticks and Other Recollections of Public Pools
I once cracked open a diving stick and emptied the sand from it for no good reason. I walk past the fence of the public pool and am hit with a burning sensation within the caverns of my nostrils from the day I first jumped into deep water without holding my nose. Instinct exhales the…
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Yule
Fingers of a lady sitting on the evening train viciously storm the pages of sparkling new book simply entitled Christmas Poems. With a curious smile I peer down from where I stand and remind myself it is the 18th of June.
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Open Wide | Uber Ride
This one time when I was young the casing of a popcorn kernel hugged a hind tooth in my mouth for the better part of a month. That tooth has a number. My dentist is in her early 30s and she has that early 30s pep about her that most girls that age have forfeited…
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The Vacuum Dance
Maid and maiden in one, collecting dirt and dust brought down by time itself, is oft confined to her wayward thoughts. No matter the lonely durations when futile impresses nullify her persisting mind, gladness is pinned on her tired heart. Within dusting and polishing and scrubbing and scraping dried food pieces from dinnerware, one task…
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Seeing the Signs
Observing signs in the modern age. In the city… There’s a man standing facing the flow of foot traffic when I get to the train station. I notice an easel stand with a sign clipped from fasteners on the top edge. The thick black words on the sign ask of the passersby, “Do you know…
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Softly-Filtered Wool Sweaters
The drives seemed to be endless, those he took with his father. An endless motor hum, and endless drone of rubber on the highway, an endless silence choking the air between driver and passenger. The silence was unbearable. Paul always wondered what was going through the older man’s mind as he sat silent behind the…
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Care of the Moon
The sun drips behind a mountain range. Lustering clouds bulge high then widen. One breathes in droplets the gracious welkin as if in sport. She is graceful in her expansion, cycling through a billow of personalities. Each begs for attention. Each swells for interpretation. A girl bends to pick a flower. As she tilts her…
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Nature’s Farthings
An unending summer is as rare as a winter wont never to cease. Spring grasses are ever wet and a phantom chill assails autumn gusts. To live where we lived for our sole year, where nature endows ample and nearly equal time to each of the quarterly climes indeed molded the memory of how the…
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The You Not Looking
Something’s been holding back the words. It might be the version of me that’ll read these lines one day. Winding me down back roads toward a painted horizon, as fabricated as one on the set of an old western. Pulling my eyes from the one I’m driving towards. Still, something’s been holding back the words.…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 