spring prints

And now a word from our sponsor!
I have some poems coming out in print journals in the next few weeks.

The annual RHINO will publish two of my homebody poems, two of a bunch of poems I’d like to package in a chapbook. RHINO took Steam and sPonge, the latter being about a kitchen sponge, written in the tradition of the wonderful Francis Ponge, a great observer who has brought many inanimate beings, including the baguette, to life. My sPonge begins –
“The sponge comes like a cut of beef, a vivisection rife with pocks and gulches.”

Barn Owl Review 3, out any day now, will publish Unseen, a backyard poem that starts –
“An airplane slices up Sunday
and why do I have to listen?”

Whiskey Island 57 is publishing two poems, Riding Backwards on the Train and To Long Division. I hate long division, and the nightmare returned when my kids hit fifth grade or so, and still hasn’t ended.

As to riding backwards on the train, I personally don’t mind it, but I notice how many people do mind it, and the poem is written from that point of view. It starts: “It’s not unpleasant: perpetual surprise.”

I ride the train every day and don’t mind it, with the exception of the occasional coffee slurper, cell phone chatterer and multiple seat hog. Mostly I like babies, even crying babies, which drop into my life like a surprise test.