One Way a Maker Makes

How can you hurry a poem? You can’t. The simmering stew on the fire satisfies sooner. Lovers under the slow moon come faster. The seed of a soul, nine months making, makes quicker. Opening the door on a poem begins with finding it first, only to learn the key has been lost ‘till it’s found … Continue reading One Way a Maker Makes →

“Cynosure” Fumbles a Masterpiece

Eric Studdard was working on his three hundred and twenty-third masterpiece. This one would be a winner for sure. He had spent the better part of an hour on it and the poem was currently two hundred and ninety-seven words long, with thirty-one lines and seven and ¾ completed verses. It was composed along the … Continue reading “Cynosure” Fumbles a Masterpiece →

A Day Too Cold for Goat

Sometimes I wish I never opened that parcel that mom gave me for Halloween. So, I was glad to see the way it was on Sunday. It was gray and cold all day. The wind was cold. It shook the trailer and scratched the branch of the dead cottonwood back and forth across the window. … Continue reading A Day Too Cold for Goat →

Advice Sorely Obtained#1

To empower a writer show them the Oxford English Dictionary, steal their grammar text book, and fire their spell checker. The good ones will manage regardless; the so-so will do fine; and the bad ones will fault out.

Re: the RPD Writeup on ‘Fleek”

Upon reading the tag for the Ragtag word of the day, and after looking at the Urban Dictionary invective referenced therein, I just—JUST—could not resist the following diatribe on one of my fav hobbies-hosses (trying to grave our vocabulary in concrete tombs) which also includes one of my pettest peeves—undervaluing the full, social, historic, and … Continue reading Re: the RPD Writeup on ‘Fleek” →

How Delmare Wrote his Next

“Saloon was a fancy name for the place. Saloon had associations by etymology that suggested class. This was not a class place. The squeak-hinged door had squeaked the same tune for forty years—opening-to-closing, six days a week. (Closed Sundays, except for select parties and football games.) A twenty-four inch, dust-dimmed TV hung from the ceiling … Continue reading How Delmare Wrote his Next →

Two-fer-Tuesday on Wednesday

under this lonely moon bemused by a solitary goose 'wonkg'— wanting the perfect V migration

They Begin the Descent into the Ufflands

“It’s the only way,” Evan said. He scanned the steep ice filled chutes and the long steep ridge. “Obviously. But where does it go?” Dorothy had a lot of things she had to be thinking of. Not the least of which was the seed she carried. “Seed of a new mankind,” the old shaman had … Continue reading They Begin the Descent into the Ufflands →

Like imprinted ducklings— they follow her swagger across campus— these poetry undergrads Prepared in response to the Ragtag Community daily prompt: sequacious

All morning I wait— blank paper, no poems—on the window are moths, waiting too. In response to the Ragtag Community daily prompt contact