Winter Glitter

I have two poems in the new issue of GlitterPony.

Late night thoughts

Food Network needs to stop showing commercials that tell me to put powdered ranch dressing on pork chops as if that's a reasonable thing to do.

Christmas shopping/wrapping presents should be a career. Probably my favorite thing to do.

Now I'm wondering what other sentences I can write that end with "to do."

Grading 48 essays next week is all I have left to do.

November

Each day brings new clothes. The sun knows it needn't show itself to soak our bones. November is a foreign tongue. Its syllables go monotone in local mouths, mouths yawning wide with gratitude and expectation.

I have some sections of a long poem in the new Alice Blue Review, which is very pretty. All hay and gourds and fall.

Fåhræus (1921), a Swedish physician who devised the erythrocyte sedimentation rate, suggested that the four humours were based upon the observation of blood clotting in a transparent container. When blood is drawn in a glass container and left undisturbed for about an hour, four different layers can be seen. A dark clot forms at the bottom (the "black bile"). Above the clot is a layer of red blood cells (the "blood"). Above this is a whitish layer of white blood cells (the "phlegm", now called the buffy coat). The top layer is clear yellow serum (the "yellow bile").

Vacation Highlights

lake root beer, using a boat to buy ice cream, boat ride ice cream,
coconut gelato, capital oktoberfest, culver's, great dane soft pretzels,
milwaukee art museum, woodland patterns bookstore, juggling
store, 75 degrees, sheep's milk cheese, pretzilla pretzel buns.

What I've been reading lately

Fainting in women was a commonplace trope or stereotype in Victorian England and in contemporary and modern depictions of the period. This may have been partly due to genuine ill-health (the respiratory effects of corsets are frequently cited), but it was fashionable for women to affect an aristocratic frailty and create a scene by fainting at a dramatic moment.

Summer = Popsicles

Flavors made so far:

Strawberry-Limeade
Pimm's & 7 w/ sliced Strawberries
Kiwi-Coconut
Fruit Salad (Sliced mango, kiwi, strawberries & blueberries in limeade)

Flavors consumed at other people's houses:

Bourbon Peaches & Cream
Watermelon Blueberry Mojito

What I've been writing lately

Sometimes I experience a tinnitus-like ringing in my ears in addition to the sunspots. Other times my hearing becomes cloudy, or even inverted, in which I seem to hear a muffled version of the chaos occurring inside my body. Imagine the steady din of a crowded restaurant played backwards, with someone constantly raising and lowering the volume. Now imagine that restaurant is underwater.

Ashtray glass hurries into trashcans on mornings like this.

Summer Thoughts

Sometimes I think if I could get paid to just sit
at a desk & waste time online I’d be all set.
Whenever I’ve been unemployed in the past
I’ve tried to convince myself that
I’d eventually get bored/depressed
if I never had to work again
but I never really believe it.
I try to convince myself that this realization
is troubling & indicates a serious
lack of motivation/purpose but I just end up
being impressed/reassured by how self-aware I am.

You’re whipping butter in some sweltering kitchen / but right now I can almost see you perched in the cherry tree / can still feel the way it makes my legs go hollow / & if you don’t mind I think I’ll just stare until the rain / washes you away.

Tuscaloosa writers (including myself) wrote small pieces about a robot statue that's on UA's campus. All proceeds will go to Holt Elementary School, which was damaged in the tornadoes. Check it out. Order. Promote.

http://sadrobotbooks.bigcartel.com/

I have three micro-fictions up at Monkeybicycle, from a new project currently titled This Was Before.

I have three poems in the newest issue of Jellyfish, which came out today.

Reading Chelsey Minnis for School and Then Writing Like Her

It is a hard thing to talk about poems…

To put on the ill-fitting hat of knowledge…

Talking about poems can feel like putting on a suit and handing out those little green bibles on street corners…

A blood-and-feathers swan is nice to think about but I would rather see a shadow-puppet swan…

Let’s agree to come to more mutual decisions…to agree to disagree…

If you get the vaccine you can immerse yourself in the thick of it all…no problem!

But vaccines are big money…big ticket items…the healer only has so many…

Everything…all at once…makes you sick…but you’ll get over it…

Get well soon!...(you have a job to do)…

Poems are not a job but they can feel like one sometimes…

Yes Please New Eric Baus Poems

Owl Wool

The sky fermented a cotton tarp. The baffled voiceover spread. Iris’s dove scored itself with scales while owl wool coated the clouds.




more here

Irishness

I have a poem up at Everyday Genius today.

I spend too much time wondering if other people wonder if they’re crazy. If other people sometimes scare themselves when they are alone in their homes. Am I the only one who sometimes finds it impossible to sleep because I’m too busy picturing yards of dark red and light blue threads unspooling from the tiny holes in my eyelids, the ones eyelashes grow out of? I wonder whether others let loose sounds they didn’t plan to, never imagined or expected them taking shape within the wet walls of their lungs. Do other people’s bodies occasionally capsize or careen into furniture and foundations? Do their limbs briefly turn into violent propellers or severed electrical cords without warning?

Bird & Meat Subject

the words / in my throats // once sure as cream //
spinning the human voice / around the atom


Maybe you want to read more of Eleni Sikelianos?

mfa talk

B. Wells: poetry's not a real thing matthew. it doesnt count.
Me: no but fiction's boring. rather be fake than boring
B. Wells: yeah? haha. i had no idea.
Me:seems like a good motto for life?

How Have I Gone This Long Without Ever Annagramming My Name?

These are just five of the 25,779 possibilities:

Ahem Tan My Wheat

A Wheat Tame Hymn

Eaten Hath My Maw

Methane What May

Mama Hath Ten Yew


Off you go to do your own.

The story is like a wooden skull because it creaks

More crazy book art by Brian Dettmer here.

New Year, New Malady

Lately I keep feeling phantom vibrations in my left sweatshirt pocket,
but then realize my phone is not in my pocket, nor set to vibrate.

This is probably a precursor to some terrible medical condition I should
investigate further. It's probably cancer. Pocket cancer.

OCD OCD OCD

Did you know that Howard Hughes test landed his prototype sea plane 5,116 times?

Or that he refused to send flowers to funerals due to his backflow theory of germs,
in which he imagined germs, illnesses, and disease finding their way to him,
the sender of the flowers?




Outstanding.

Three Plagues Short of an Exodus

Oh blog, it has been so long. I promise I have had nothing to say.

I really want to start painting again. Maybe this summer that will happen.
I spent a good hour looking through the art magazines in Barnes & Noble's
magazine section, especially New American Paintings.

If I was in the position where $20 wasn't kind of too much money to be
spending on art magazines I would probably buy it, though this introduces
the question of spending well over $20 on art supplies. We'll see what
happens.