"Story Mountain" published by Fine Lines

One of my poems, "Story Mountain," is in the current issue of Fine Lines.

three of my poems published

 "Showing My Husband what I Learned in Elementary Ballet during a Whiteout in Omaha, Nebraska", "Memorial Day Weekend, Omaha Boarding House " and "Rapture" are included in the spring 2017 issue of the After Happy Hour Review. The selection is definitely influenced by relocating to the Midwest.

"Lisa in the Galaxies" and "New York party scene: twenty-four and" published by Thistle Magazine

two of my poems-- "Lisa in the Galaxies" and "New York party scene: twenty four and" are in the current issue (Growth) of Thistle Magazine. It's a gorgeous mag, and if you hate to read, you should download it just for the aesthetic. It's that beautiful. www.thistlemagazine.com

1 story + 1 poem picked up for publication

my short story "Teeth" was picked up for publication last Friday, and my poem "Mermaid Show" was picked up this morning. Both in upcoming issues of separate journals.

pretty awesome.

on the marriage plot.

so i finished Eugenides' new book, the marriage plot, yesterday in the early afternoon. people i meet, especially young people i meet, think i am batty for spanning so much time reading. it is not the fact that i do not have cable, or that i watch a ridiculous amount of films or that i like to ride my bicycle to the art museum downtown. probably because these are very young, romantic things to do. these are things we all do when we are at our most romantic or want to be at our most romantic or want to impress our romance on other people. lovers smoking cigarettes in bed, smeared eyeliner, girls with dark curly hair that refuse to be on top, that hide their soft parts. girls that look like young colts with strong legs, faces of deers. antlers, strong angry parts, to match. they are piecemeal parts of french films where the girls have short hair and breton stripe sweaters. 

they are the parts we turn ourselves into on autumn days, when we walk around alone, staring into shop windows with a cigarette between our lips looking disconnected being romantic being happy being alone in our public solitude being truly happy because others notice this and think we are romantic and dreamy. we are all like this at least when we know we are at the cusp of not being this anymore.


books are not like this. i do not even keep my books out anymore, lined neatly on the shelves. instead, they have there own big closet, with floor to ceiling books. like the game closet in the royal tenenbaums. some books are in my dressing room stacked beneath crystal lamps, magazines in a box in the corner. and the rest of my books have a side bedroom. they stay hidden. they sleep a lot and are mostly only woken up by me.

characters in books are like ghosts. i am always always haunted afterward, and if it is story that feels especially close, it stays with me for weeks and weeks. they start to hurt my heart. their decisions in the end begin to weigh on me. like if leonard was ever going to return from the woods, finally come back as wholly human and begin to be himself again and if that self could be counted on as a real, less fractured thing. and if mitchell meant what he said when he realized the dream was not like the first parts of reality. that the world and the dreams in it are far more desolate than we pretend. that they are not the parts that save us. i wonder if he really meant to go this time.

i ask strange questions about people i know and think strange things about people we know. and then i am asked why i am thinking about that and i say that i just spent the past week and a half with three people in a very familiar love triangle and i wonder how common all that is now and how empty. i remember those kinds of manic feelings and how exhausting and boring it all ends up.

growing up, i kept all my poems and all the books i read hidden too and did all the rough and tumble bad seed things right along with the rest. then suddenly the secret parts bloomed into tremendous flowers. and i get to wear them in my hair now and the world feels so different. it is like i never ever ever gave up the ghost at all, i just gave up the skeletons and i gave up the rooms, i gave up the crowds and the parts of pretending. i gave up the parts i never really loved at all but really truly would have willed myself to do so. which is maybe why the end of the marriage plot cuts real deep. because i know i have stood on the subway looking for someone desperately and i know i have been locked in the attic and Eugenides' knows it all. his books are the lucid parts of the fractured memories we all have. he knows the relationship between girls and their longing and girls and their bad ideas girls and big mistakes and secret truths.

dreams never end.

lately whenever i go to bed, lately in this little house, when it is in the early ams and i try to fall asleep, and there is a ghost tapping and talking beside me until all hours of the morning, lately when i try to fall asleep the world begins to feel like an abrupt end. the world feels like it is disrupted like something drastic has happened behind me and i cannot turn around far enough to see. i never turn around. never. the other night i am walking on the driveway of my grandmother’s old house, the one with the red front door and the maze of oak trees and azaleas, and there is a chubby-cheeked boy on a red tricycle that looks identical to my little brother. he is pedaling faster and faster, just like Nick would, the two wheels of the back tumble over the front and the face identical to my little brother’s shatters on the concrete. I wake, though i was not fully asleep to dream, I wake to tell the ghost, and it never felt like it ended. the room was still the room, the outer scope of the world of the dream. the peach trees still scratch the skylights and sound like crawling fingers up the walls. lately i dont sleep at all.

i lay on the floor and read gregory corso poems and i type poems on my typewriter that i would never let anyone see. i think of corso’s long hair and my friend’s long hair, the last time i saw him, and how sad it made me. i imagine the sea-shapes of the world around me, the fruit trees and the aging faces of the few people i love and i know that my life has consisted, intricately and deliberately, only of these things. no matter what land lines and connections i try to match point by point, no matter the energy and electricity i think i feel between the pages of people my own age, it is never, in the end, the true parts of my life. most people do not become my ghosts. and being here is like being a dead man on the sea and seeing an island behind me, as a place i once used to lay my head, barren with people i could not get too close to. and maybe that is just how the world works— we are just a layered space of time and energy, just ghosts for centuries passing through one another, with only those few idle moments where we stop long enough to feel the breath on our necks.

a few weeks ago when i was still on the island i had a sad dream about my long-haired friend. we were in this terribly old, ornate hotel— a place where my dreams usually like to go. sometimes to masked parties in the courtyard where the women wear gauzy white gowns and float between the maze of hedges and sometimes in the rooms that are sad and shaky. in this dream my long-haired friend was on the bed and he was not the person he is but the person i always thought he seemed to be. it was bright and the windows were bare and we left and we walked and talked and it felt like i always thought it could feel, in my subconscious imagination, it felt like i pretended it felt in real life for years. we went to my little house and walked into the bright little jewel case, and my brother was standing there and he showed me this way to turn my house into a shadow. suddenly the grey gaze of the world settled on the air of the room and everything looked made of dust, including my friend. standing in this house of shadow, with him shifting into a shadow himself, and then just shrugging softly and disappearing into the walls.

i rode my bike for a while this morning. i went out alone along with ambling cypress and the white light of the sun and i closed my eyes and suddenly and finally felt okay with being a loner and that living as a shadow for a while is the only way to get out and get away from the things you have to leave. and really, for me, ive never thought about how happy i used to be, but instead, and always, about how happy i am going to be. i know my past and i find it dull because of my absolute relation to it and i feel burdened when my emotions outlive my logic and my immediate world becomes this fragile, sinking thing and there is only enough left to carry on my back and keep moving. it never turns out that i make the same decisions someone else would make or that ive followed in the footsteps of anything. lately, most all these old lines have been lost or cut away and just like the two most significant points in my life so far, ive had to walk out of the room alone.