Posts for June 1, 2026 (page 3)

Saw seven deer this evening
making my way down Stark Ridge
as the sun sank down behind the hills.
The deer didn’t flip their fluffy white tails
and float over the nearest fence.
It’s their favorite time of the day,
dawn and dusk, crepuscular creatures
with soft eyes and hide the color
of the golden hour.
The fresh young does leapt leisurely
and daintily off the center line
and stuck the landing in a grassy field
to stare me down as I drove by, slow,
window wide open to the night air
and stuck there.
None of us were in any hurry. 

it’s been a day
in day out
thread of incontinuity. 
Stretched thin
raised thick in
even and odd places. 
Energy burned and consumed
by a dying star,
if calling yourself a dying star
is even productive…

My list of summer resolutions includes the following items:

        -learn to send a text message without adderall.

        -scrub the fine black webbing off the side of my car.

        -spit sticky letters ad infinitum, acid or sugar.

        -see it from every angle, let it peel me back and bite.

        -push my shame into traffic and watch it get flattened.

A year ago, studying for the bar exam
Now I swim out in the deep end
Which once seemed so far
Out of sight and out of reach of toe tip

I embrace the scent of chlorine in my hair
And the feel of water in my eyes
Smiling untethered with memories of each
kick and push it took to get here

In welcoming this June, I welcome the unknown

I woke up that night
and reached for my journal
just a few words, jotted down in
half-sleeping-half-waking
hardly even able to grasp the pen
in those too-dark hours only known by lovers
and those with small bladders
my wish for life

“I don’t want to be famous
I just want to sit under the stars,
with a cat on my lap,
and my mortgage paid.”

One yellow light and a million cars
is all that stands in the way of my getting to work on time.
In the great wait of turning,
in all of the gaps between incoming traffic too small for me to fit through
I think about something dumb that I read once in a comic book
(or maybe watched in a cartoon a long time ago),
something about alternate timelines existing at the molecular level.
And I think about what universe lives in the molecules of that yellow light
which might as well be red. 
I envision pirates being carried in great pirate ships
pulled by camels across a long yellow stretch of sand
to plunder and kill anyone who might be travelling alone.
And who might be traveling alone?
Delivery people probably, 
slaves of the evil Quardabarth Corporation,
forced to carry out shipments of fidget spinners and fidget cubes
lest their spouses and children be fed to Withhlebob,
the great spouse and child eater. 
And in the cities
(safe from the plunder of pirates on ships pulled by camels)
the Quardabarth Corp sends its agents to kill and sabotage their competitors
and someone’s brother or son dies defending Quardabarth from theirs. 
Big men in big robotic suits die defending the great yellow dessert from invading aliens,
red ones from the north and green ones from the south,
beings whose survival can only mean the total annihilation of the other two
(or so they all believe).
Little robots in little men suits sit in bunkers
writing propaganda for the war and for Quardabarth 
and for anyone else with money in the pot
(a literal pot that dances and bites).
All of this happens for minutes and an eternity
until the man with his hand on the lever thinks–
that’s enough
and shuts it all off.
And the pirates, and the camels, and the salespeople, 
their spouses, children, the one who ate them, and the ones that owned him,
those who died on all sides, and their fathers, and their brothers,
and even the propaganda writing robots
will all be lost to the darkness and the abyss
for minutes and an eternity 
until it all starts up again.
And if I don’t make this left turn soon
I’m going to be late for work.

There are seeds in the packet of my skull,
dry and still unsown

i’m ishmael
clinging to a coffin
surrounded by gliding sharks
an orphan waiting
for the rachel

Memory like a steel trap,
like jolting with a camera flash.
I see real life angels, I am
feeling the fluttering and then
He says “Listen to sound of
their wings slapping”
I think birds, I think angels,
I think demons, father, daughter.

Dance and twist, pretzel
Knots and gnats, not
A loose interpretation, lose
The key, stuck in a lock
Til the key lime pie unlocks.

It’s tit for tat, the tater tots
Fly in oil, jumping and coiling
This nonsensical kangaroo
Free-ranged from the zoo

Of words you knew.