Well, outside of college-based publications, that is. But yes: My short horror story “Pruritus” is now available alongside eight other cool authors in Issue 44 of the mad, macabre magazine “Sanitarium“! And for a low, low price to boot!
Check out the purchase links below if you’re itching for a good read on…
I went back home to Washington State for Spring Break, and… it didn’t feel like it used to. I’m still not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I thought I should “write it out.”
Home Less
People speak of haunted houses,
but never the reverse.
We mistake it at first, home,
for the cabinets, countertops, and plastic toys.
That’s, after all, as far as our goals go,
as far as nimble legs can carry us:
to the playground,
TV room,
town bar.
Postcards, plaques, and photographs
hold fast the roof we sleep beneath—
hoarded mortar to the bricks.
All the world’s a game, and
you must be this tall to exit.
But over years,
under fees, degrees, double-digit birthday cakes,
expectations asphyxiate—comparisons oppress.
The mind moves but loops, running
not a marathon but a track:
Even if you notice a new patch of grass,
it’s still a circle.
And one day, returning turns nothing at all.
Through the front door,
and the past piles on, quarterback-like:
Memories of memories, of thoughtless acts
and thoughts never acted on.
The gravel avenue, the green, greener grass
remain unchanged,
yet the mailbox peels, the Jeep rusts,
and the dusty halls shine quieter.
Mirthful or mournful,
you can’t go back.
Every room is an interrogation room,
wrecked by recollections, recursion of diversions.
The bed’s a confessional,
coaxing midnight doubts and dreams
from uncanny comfort.
Bookshelves elevate what once mattered:
Piggy banks, cracked glasses, collector’s editions uncashed.
Half-sketches, bookmarks bisecting paperbacks,
beg questions:
When does a to-do become a once-was?
When does an ambition become an anecdote?
Branch out enough, and the limb will snap
at the base.
So it scares me, like a trust fall in transit,
that with so much behind, I don’t know where I’m headed.
Not depressed but compressed, lifted up
and weighed down at once
by the prospect of prospects.
Sure, stability is a privilege,
with a cap on laments.
Still, it’s unrelenting, this discontent
when the contents of my mind
mirror the zip code of my former universe.
A false sense of insecurity must come from somewhere.
When the beginning of your world starts feeling like its end,
the lucid dream becomes sleep paralysis—
a vacation becomes tourism through history.
There’s no cure for maturity,
but there is a placebo.
Just know
home is not a place
but a space, a radius
orbiting wherever we go—
satellites of plans, passions, and aspirations.
Home is not a building
filled with odds and ends and quiet blind spots.
It is building:
A life, a wife, a gig, something big,
or at least bigger than you were
the day before.
And until I lay those bricks—
wrap those drafts, earn that office,
let a ring follow a call for once—
there’s no place to rest.
But I’m fine being home less.
–
Me circa the turn of the millennium, give or take a few years.
It’s World Poetry Day! This is, it turns out, not to be confused with National Poetry Day and National Poetry Month. To switch things up, I thought I’d take a step back and not write something new and ceremonious but simply reflect on my history with the form.
The first poem I ever came up with dates way back to 1998, at the age of 6. My parents were driving me somewhere and, as I stared up into the night sky, a quatrain just popped into my head:
–
A star is a sun
Waiting to be free
For when I had wished on it for life
It had wished on me.
–
At some point, a dictated copy in gentle calligraphy ended up in a little frame on my wall—and that of my grandma, too, ever the keeper of memories. At times, on brief trips back home for rest and respite between my studies and professional to-dos, I pause at those pictures. I reflect on how far I’ve come as a writer, and how far I still have to go.
I’ve moved through many phases of poetry since then, from goofy sing-song odes to my hobbies, to song parodies, to morose romance, to (I’d like to think) making the most of that English degree with deft imagery and wordplay. While I’ve never produced enough–or experimented intensely enough–to honestly define myself as a “poet” foremost, I still hold poetry in high regard as the purest form of expression. Music may predate it in using rhythm to strike a mood and captivate an audience, but language–by design–truly bridges the gap between thinking and feeling. Yet while grammar and syntax are useful, nobody thinks or feels the way we write an essay, a speech, a memoir, or even a blog post. Ambition isn’t utilitarian. Fears aren’t logical. Hopes don’t stall for commas and paragraph breaks.
And poetry runs on a spectrum; infused in storytelling, it’s what separates a paperback thriller from a literary classic, or a rote screenplay from an award-winning script. You don’t have to see the line breaks to know they’re there–and conversely, you don’t have to hear consonance, assonance, or clever spacing for it to impact how you feel when your eyes scan the page.
It doesn’t have to rhyme, or even make sense at first glance. It just has to mean more than it says. That freedom can be as paralyzing as it is exciting.
I welcome the challenge.
This is a poem ragging on someone I used to be.
ISYMFS
Self-pity is exhausting.
Setting up. Dressing down.
Hitting the bench and feeling the burn
of bridges and bones,
red-browed, tearing up.
No shuffle mode. Workout routine is key.
Purposeful discontent.
Warm-up: five reps of Radiohead,
creeping through the fake plastic trees.
But we’re just getting started.
Ed Sheeran works the chest,
an Iron-Man core of sweat as you power through
the half-hics, clicks of exes’ Facebooks
and photo albums unmodified for years.
Upper back: Motion City Soundtrack,
shrugging at exaggerated inadequacy.
Rack it. Congrats.
Selective rejection sets a beat
to push through pain.
Take a break in-between exercises
and stare down the ceiling.
Plead and need and
listen enough, and Achievement Unlocked:
Everything You Deserve.
(At least, that’s the plan.)
Legs day takes determination,
bipolar but still the same bar.
Brow furrowed, striding uphill, across town,
head light from wistful intents and retroactive rebellion.
Make it a day to remember—
keep your hopes up high and your head down low.
Arms are Snow Patrol:
Balled fists at kisses missed
and arm tensed, “V” for vowing
it’ll never be as good as it was back then.
Crunches: hunching over the PC,
a knuckle-gut feeling as you surveil
the blips and tickers, traffic-like,
for a flirty PM or Verified retweet
suggesting there’s still a chance.
It takes a lot of activity
to be inactive.
And Coldplay? Creatine, the chaser
to an evening well-undone.
Don’t forget to stretch
with some neutral Top 40 tune.
It’s okay to go tired to bed,
just not breathless.
But, you know what?
The gains never come
and the wait never lightens.
Personal trainers are costly,
and spotters hard to come by.
So, I’m thinking,
if you try to raise your spirits and it breaks your back,
take some plates off already.
It’s less muscles to smile than frown,
goes the cliché, so hey—
why strain something?
Yeah, things not working out is a workout,
but it doesn’t have to be a burnout.
Motivation goes both ways, and so it’s high time
you scaled back—slowed up—
eased down the dumb bells
and said “what the hell,”
It’s still your set,
and I know you can lift less.
[Happy Daylight Saving Time! With it, I announce my new goal: A submission a day, a poem a week, a story a month, a book a year. Let’s do this thing already!]
Vigils
Vigils are interesting.
Why always at night?
To be sadder, more dramatic?
People can mourn in the morning,
die during the day,
get introspective anywhere.
The candles wouldn’t even need to be lit
if the sun was up.
It struck me as
an inelegant elegy, a premature retrospective.
The funeral frontloaded and publicized.
A pat aftermath of fundraisers and belated favors.
Not insensitive, just intrigued.
Numb to the inevitable.
Always staring more than sharing
in a loss.
So when I did attend one,
the college President having passed to cancer a weekend prior,
I wanted to care—and did.
Still, a sense of intrusion loomed over me
as I marched to the plaza—
no tale to tell, no anecdote to impart.
As if spectating carried a scent
and out I’d be found.
But it didn’t matter.
It wasn’t cresting the hill
and seeing the place packed with solemn students.
Or the emcee’s invocation,
to thank us all for coming
and just wanting to say a few words before we all began.
Nor the moment of silence.
No, it’s the motions and emotions
only presence can capture.
Not the photographer’s exhibit of a tear-hardened cheek
or the paper’s front-page summary,
relegated to rusty coffee shop news-racks.
Sadness spreads,
and who we keep in our thoughts could fill a whole shelter,
but there’s no honor by proxy, no tristesse à deux.
It’s the prone canvas of handwritten hopes, thanks, and well-wishes
on a foldout table to the side—
the eulogy democratized, a technicolor tombstone.
It’s the tremble of a dozen hands as they pen condolences,
and the shades chosen:
Black (traditional),
orange for vitality, pink for love, blue for hope.
It’s a tall Tupperware subbing as a donation box,
aflow with crisp and crumpled bills alike.
To attend is free, but everyone will contribute.
It’s how a man speaks about What She Meant to Me,
and, candle in hand, my pedantry melts in kind.
The weeping wax is a quick pinch
of the thumb en route to concrete,
and I should have known
we sleepwalk through work, play, and three square meals,
only to truly wake in the lonesome, cold, and eerie hours.
Death is a tide that stains instead of cleanses,
and the waves crash by dark
yet recede by day.
We can’t stop the storms, but we can build each-other lighthouses.
One wick to another, pale palms raised
to signal shore:
Faith. Thankfulness. Perspective.
The band lilts, coaxing notes
to lay a hand on bucking shoulders.
A sheet of music draped over the coffin to come.
There are minds and souls here, but no body,
and nobody is leaving just yet.
We are one wonder less,
wonderless the world still turns.
Better to learn it together,
to feel around emptiness and still take something out of it,
because memory is not a spectator sport.
– – –
So believe it or not, for #Blizzard2016, I was stressed but cozy in a Manhattan lawyers’ conference room, practicing a moot court argument. But in snapping a few pics on break (Instagram: TNW24!), I was so struck (literally and spiritually) by the historically epic levels of snow that I decided to semi-freewrite a little poem:
A blue view, double digits up.
The reflections of our inflections
float over the snow like ghosts, and
it’s haunting,
this icy twilight, when sirens fire down empty avenues,
flakes swirling so the fall and rise look alike
to tired eyes lifting a headache
past glass, under a flickering light
over a lavish table.
Delicate delicacies and canned heat, bottled water—
an anxious banquet by holed-up hosts,
mostly confident we’ll make it out of here safely at dark.
As our floor scrapes the sky, so sleet scrapes the streets
in sheets, defeating any chance of steady wi-fi
or an uneventful stroll to the ATM.
The air occluded, Arctic darkness
blows gridwise in cold lines,
a hazy maze that shakes structures and ruptures Saturday plans.
The windows across are white-swept cells, clotted with frost.
The lights are off, and nobody home—
A law firm’s a bunker when New York is Nome.
Hope everybody else in the area stayed safe and warm!
Happy Valentine’s Day! In my regrettable absence (full disclosure: no real reason, I just got busy and then Christmas Break happened/was pretty great), the rest of 2014 and the start of 2015 came and went without much in the way of remarkable developments–I made it through another semester at Cornell Law School with a modest cumulative 3.4 GPA and am preparing to advance to a higher editor position on the Cornell Law Review, but progress on my novel, “There’s Something Wrong with the Neighbor’s Cat” (link goes to pretty darn outdated character profiles) has been drip feed-esque at best, and the hunt for some manner of fulfilling legal work over the summer continues. Also, I’m trying to build a PC–parts so far include the processor, monitor, about twenty new Steam games, and this reasonably baller case:
It’s on like TRON.
So since the only thing piling up more than sparkly, Solo cup-studded snow over here in Ithaca, NY is academic obligations, I’ll be brief in circling back around to that first joyful lead-in: It’s February 14th! Short story shorter, I’m still single, but if I wanted to straight bemoan the fact I’d send you a link to my Tumblr. Instead, in a bit of a “less is more” combo, I’ve got a pair of poems produced under varying circumstances. The first is another semiautobiographical magnetic poetry quickie I assembled while in the good ol’ “waiting room” at the UW’s English Department in the recesses of Padelford Hall while back home for the holidays. I don’t really name these ones, but I guess “What Boy” is as good a title as any:
The second poem is one I actually wrote about a year ago, not coincidentally close to this time of the month. I didn’t share it initially because, to be honest, it’s pretty dang rough, schmaltzy, and was initially typed as “prose” on a lark describing the subject to a friend in a late-night Facebook message. I gave it and the reasons behind it some time to cool off, though, and figured today that it couldn’t hurt to toss it up again in light of the season, if only as something of an emotional time capsule–in any case, it’s vague enough that I’d like to think folks with a quirky, geeky sense of romance can relate to it (and I doubt those are in short supply on the internet!) , whether in a relationship or not. So again, just think of it as bittersweet “pop poetry,” and enjoy reading about a feeling that’s…
Notes&Sketches 