Effects of trauma experience — When I swallowed the bottle of aspirin the light split into beams of color. Mimicked the way my spirit ripped from my flesh. I wondered: Is this how it is? Does the world just destruct? Does it all just…fall apart? I’ve been in two mental hospitals. One for holding a…

However they remember it — When I left prison, I dedicated my life to abstinence from drug and alcohol use. It’s important because the decision was a vector. It was about direction. Cardinals. North. I wanted to go somewhere in a straight line. I hoped that somewhere on the other end there would be a…

An alternate dimension — A fractal desert broken up by bongo trucks and the occasional donkey. Early morning. The sun lifts. Oppressive. What it is like. schism. Tears in the fabric where third-world poverty spills out like plasma. Paved roads surrounded by webs of dirt roads that meander into wet gullies. Lemongrass and currant…

A pile of blocks — They filled a dump truck with water and placed the explosives beneath it. When it detonated, the water directed the explosion downward, destroying a four-lane bridge. I felt the explosion two miles away. The first time I experienced a rocket alarm, I looked around at the other infantrymen. Nobody moved…

A story of attempted interdictions — A field of snow covered in dead grass: snakes grow fat on groundhogs and field mice. I walk and hold my thumb and finger to my purpling lip. Winds whip across the plain to deliver lashings. It is cold here, dead, the once pillowy snow has turned to ice shelves…

The poetry cave — All that I wish to say to you would take years if I was careful to pronounce them from cherry lips I am sawdust plywood elm tree so I cannot speak. All that I have to offer you would take seconds if I was brave enough to hold you make you mine…

The poetry cave — When the fog lifts and I’m sorry again: hoping God is within a stone’s throw because faith needs a place to land. I begin to see how: the moment my knees stop hurting my heart begins to ache. Tell people to go away for long enough and they start to…

The poetry cave — I. We know the streets: frigid winds that horse-bite through threadbare clothes, early morning runs to make cash for the encyclopedia of bills on the kitchen table, he is black and I am white, poverty accepts us both, we are in and from: where wealthy weekenders can slum it and make stories for…

The Poetry Cave —