All my poems stand on the words of others in some way, this particular one more explicitly than most. When my buddy Bud Webster became poetry editor at the controversial Helix: Speculative Fiction Quarterly he hit me up for some verse, but I was stumped at first. My longtime friend Vickie Holt started me off by suggesting what became the poem’s first line — and during a beta-read another longtime friend, Cathy Reniere, suggested the line about Slurpees and U-turns. Finally, it was Bud who came up with the poem’s title. So I owe all of them for the existence of this piece, which is a delight to perform live.

As to the topic: in our corner of the world, zoning law is an ungainly thing akin to water and sewer utilities — it’s something that affects our daily lives in all sorts of ways seen and unseen, but nothing about it fires the imagination. As a government reporter I tangled more than once with the unenviable task of attempting to present a zoning issue so it would be interesting to readers. In my quest to come up with something for Bud, I got to thinking that I’d never ever seen a skiffy poem that dealt with things like commercial and residential districts and comprehensive plans. So that’s what I wrote.

(Read and hear the poem here.)

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

This poem is a lighthearted commemoration of the first and so far only time Anita and I attended Arisia in Boston, a sci-fi con that takes place in the dead of winter (rather inconvenient if you’re driving from Virginia.) That was in 2002, so maybe things play differently now, but when we were there I observed two local quirks of note. One, all Bostonians go out on the town wearing black from head to toe. Two, the way Bostonians handle things that are off-kilter — such as a man in a satyr costume (shirtless, with horns) lounging in a hotel lobby, or a woman (in the real life instance, my wife) having dinner in a posh restaurant in a full-blown nature spirit outfit complete with antlers and a mantle made of leaves — is to act as if they’re not there. How could I resist having fun with that?

(Read and hear the poem here.)

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

This poem has a fairly innocuous beginning. Jessica Wick, co-editor of Goblin Fruit, challenged me to write a poem about her favorite Greek god, Bacchus. Of course I accepted the challenge, and, pain in the ass that I am, since she made the mistake of telling me Bacchus was her favorite, I decided I would try to come up with the most mortifying incarnation of the old goat that I could imagine. My concept was fairly simple: update the god of wine and parties into the modern day deity of drug addiction.

Yet doing that threw a number of disturbing doors wide open. News accounts of crystal meth use in New York sex parties and addicts going into withdrawal after Hurricane Katrina are sautéed in with the fashion industry’s glamorization of “heroin chic.” And my own encounters with drug use, drug crime and its consequences while I was a courts reporter provide underpinnings for much of what happens in the poem — one story in particular that I worked on, of a teen who tried heroin for no better reason than alleviating boredom and irrevocably ruined his life, weighed heavily on me as I wrote this piece. There’s a reaction to my first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” that surfaces, and thoughts of my own father’s terminal cancer and the painkillers he takes that act as firewalls against pain also float in that mix.

Bacchus becomes conflated with Pan and the satyrs and less than any of these, a chemist consumed by his own product, summoned everywhere someone uses, everywhere someone craves, hopping like the Jersey Devil, his untrimmed and neglected hooves leaving bloody footprints wherever he goes.

(Read and hear the poem here.)

(See a stage performance here.)

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

From time to time I’ve written poems inspired by things domestic. This one is particularly dear to me, inspired by the curtains Anita crafted specially for my home office, made from thick fabric with fanciful celestial patterns. Tim Pratt published this piece in Star*Line in 2002, but it’s really not a skiffy poem at all; at its playful heart it’s about nothing more than the two of us sitting at the fire, her sewing, and me, presumably, composing a poem.

(Read and hear the poem here.)

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

At the Fantasy Literature blog, there’s a review of the March 2011 issue of Apex Magazine that includes mention of the poetry. Reviewer Terry Weyna has this to say about “The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves,” the poem I co-wrote with Sonya Taaffe and Nicole Kornher-Stace:

…the imagery is drawn with immense care, and the language is chosen to great effect. This poem, though, doesn’t just draw pictures — a noble enough quest for a poem standing alone, of course, if not the goal of this trio of poets — it tells the tale of the rivalry between the King of Cats and the Queen of Wolves across time. This is a perfect poem to read to celebrate April, which, after all, is National Poetry Month.

It’s always nice to see the poetry included in a review of a genre publication.

On top of that, Francesca Forrest, who interviewed myself, Sonya and Nicole about “King, Queen,” has created a piece of fan art based on the poem’s middle section. She posted it first on her LiveJournal. Check it out:

Tags: Reviews
Posted in Reviews, Strangeness

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash

This rough-hewn villanelle is wicked fun of a sort on the surface, but there’s something utterly unfunny underneath.

When I worked as a courts reporter, covering crimes, I learned that many terrible things follow utterly predictable patterns. I covered several murders that could be summed up the same way: a woman slain by her former husband or lover. Inevitably, these cases would have an easily-accessed paper trail attached to them, documenting threats and accusations of domestic abuse, court dates missed or charges dismissed, protective orders sworn out. And yet none of it effective in preventing tragedy — the killer might be punished afterward to some degree, but never stopped in time. I had much occasion to meditate on the mindset that green-lights this notion, that when a partner leaves, or tries to leave, or simply is suspected somehow of wanting to leave, the best response is to kill her rather than let her go and move on with your own life.

In my mind, the voice of the poem is female.

(Read and hear the poem here.)

Tags: The Journey to Kailash sampler
Posted in Poetry, The Journey to Kailash