In my day
we drank hot lemonade
straight from the faucet
and all houses were painted the same color,
a time of sacrifice and laughter,
although we did kick some serious ass
when necessary. Times weren’t so much hard
as horizontal. Televisions were white instead of
black and white, you couldn’t adjust the volume
without a stick shift,
and I never saw so much rain in all my life.

Ministers took names during services, made index cards.
It kept us all praying. Only one radio station,
one song over and over, to this day
I can’t remember which, but I do remember
always waking up to groceries on our doorstep,
not knowing how they got there.
We ate like fiends from Hell. There was no sharing,
it was considered presumptuous. Chemicals fell from the sky,
kept the cars clean. Anger was the default and we loved it.

People sold grenades door to door and no one thought twice,
it kept the prices low. We lived with our diseases, gave them rooms
and a place at the table. Nothing was left out,
miracles not unheard of, but life on Mars? That was
the government’s problem. I mean I can’t believe
what I see in the skies these days,
everyone acting like it’s their business.
The only thing that’s really our business is
our hands and feet,
our own hands and feet. That’s what Daddy said,
and Daddy, well, in my day he was Daddy enough
for you and me both.

(First published in Bond Street Review, Winter 2024. Thanks to editor Eric Evans.)

There’s a way to remember everything.

It’s a matter of envelopes, and freezers,
forgetting what should go where.

Sure, things are made in China,
made in the USA.
But for whom, and why?

That sort of scissors-looking thing
in the kitchen –
you can’t recall how to work it,
what it’s supposed to do.

But if you made up something new for it to do,
you wouldn’t have to remember

what They wanted you to do with it.
And if you put envelopes in freezers,

sometimes you might remember they are where
they aren’t supposed to be,

and before
frost forms on the glue strip,

your geography blows open. But
you have to start small.

Begin with envelopes, with freezers.
Invent new names and places

to liberate what’s lost and found,
until forgetting is all you do.
And when there is only forgetting,

it’s not forgetting any more.

(First published in Bond Street Review, Winter 2024. Thanks to editor Eric Evans.)

Murder hornets mutter in the peeling eaves
Where flags of no known nation hang.
Mom and Dad are never coming home from work,
They’ve thrown away their burner phones.

“It’s heritage, not hate,” their son lectures the cops.
“Everything but the furniture is original.”
Their daughter watches her own arrest on TV,
The cable dish pings endless conspiracy.

It seems all their dreams turn to virus.
Knees kneel on each bedroom’s warped floor,
Faces pray in an Old Testament rictus.
Mongrels mount each other in the driveway.

Just ask the Founding Fathers: it began with gunplay,
Ducked and covered through centuries of phobia
To the post-Truth you can’t teach in school:
A car on blocks, guarding a Victorian mansion.

(First published in Bond Street Review, Winter 2024. Thanks to editor Eric Evans.)