-appeared in March of 2017 at The Fem -appeared in October of 2014 at DIAGRAM. -appeared in August of 2015 at Souvenir. -appeared in June of 2015 at Powder Keg. -appeared in April of 2015 at Yes, Poetry. Prose -appeared in May of 2019 at Entropy -appeared in April of 2016 at Entropy -appeared in September of 2015 at Entropy. -appeared in February of 2015 at The Good Men Project. -appeared in April of 2014 at Luna Luna Magazine. -appeared in March of 2014 via The Listserv. -appeared in January 2014 at The Volta. Out of Print -appeared in July of 2014 at Luna Luna Magazine. The Paramahamsa -appeared in the July 2014 print issue of The Unrorean. The Compassionate -appeared in the summer 2014 print issue of The Moth. -appeared in January 2014 online at The Fat City Review. Politics -appeared in the 2013 print issue of Bluestem. To be loved without the pronunciation of love upon telephone wires or sheets is to be loved without contract‒as if the reason we are here is simple‒like twin fawns together, underneath the circle of a streetlight. -appeared in the 2012 issue of Epic, the University of Missouri's undergraduate literary journal. Since you did that I can’t climb more than three flights of stairs. They say a fall from just fifteen feet off the ground can break your kneecaps and push your femurs straight into your heart. Six feet can crack your skull. You know, after 9/11, one of my teachers warned me “Jonathan, you’ll be looking up at the sky a lot more lately” and I think of you, a scientist, how you once told me that if I ever wanted to survive a plane crash to just fall flat with my arms and legs outstretched to distribute the pain. Love is a Kitchen with Two People in It
-appeared in the 2010 issue of The Reed, St. Olaf College's annual journal of existentialist literature. I sit at the kitchen counter,
watching you wash carrots in the sink.
I sit and I sink.
Easily into my stool,
like a child—
I watch.
The way you wear your pants,
so high on your hips…
I get it, you got me.
You cross your arms and gaze at all
the herbs and spices.
Analyzing forever, I suffer.
As you make me lunch,
two o’clock in the afternoon.
Where You Fell
you melted the snow and left a trellis of vines
underneath a first-floor window
somewhere outside
Iowa and I laid there,
in the snow & the vines
until my palms ached
and my body shook
at the hands of a force
that only gets worse
with this constant rain
that blows from Portland
straight through I-70
and the clouds, they swirl the sky
like soup beans & brown eyes
over this uncivilized city
that's trapped by a state
I doubt the clouds can reach. But maybe this storm is slow to rest?
My ghost will haunt your soles
and fill each step
and fester--my poems like sores
that I still write for you by hand
will go from a box
that fate is just a word and heaven can wait and we can try again. |