From My Unsent Letters

I miss your stupid face.

Fall Journal Entry

In all good relationships one is sometimes the student, sometimes the teacher. One must be undulate to the current of ideas. Teacher-student. Student-teacher. Give-take. Give-take. An intercourse. A relationship dies if you have nothing left to teach each other, except how to live apart.

Dramatic Monolouge in Syllabic Verse

This one is pure fiction.

GIRL sits in a plastic chair in a hospital waiting room holding a coffee cup.

Spring Journal Entry

But you know I love you. I don’t say it often because it’s an impractical gift, an extraneous table lamp for a cluttered Madison apartment or a rootless flower in a water-less jar wilting in the sun.

The Art of Letter Writing in the 21st Century

Draft a letter.

Decide to type it.

Save it on Google Drive for convenient printing.

Do NOT change the permissions and allow your intended recipient to see it online because this is a letter dammit.

Print and address the letter (the most useful skill you learned in k-12 and too many people can’t do it properly.)

Use stamps with 20th century poets on them.

Search everywhere for a mailbox because this is the 21st century.

Inquire about the location of a mailbox and be asked, “Why don’t you just email it?”

Letter writing is an art. Dammit.

Rebirth of a Salesman: Alfie Zimmer’s Salvation through Literary Criticism in Stephen King’s Short Story “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away”

Sacred Heart

My heart beats too loud in my chest,

Ivory cage insufficient.

I rein it in as best I can,

The desire remains ever persistent.

So must I rip free my heart,

Clenched tight in hands obedient.

To ignite at fever’s pitch--spark

A fire most magnificent.

When it calms I place it back

To beat in time again intact.

The Island of Pineapples and Fucking

This was my final piece for Creative Nonfiction. Names have been changed to protect the...well just to protect.

Unpretentious Fruits of the Midi: An Afternoon at the Chicago Institute of Art

Ode to a Lenten Blood Orange Eaten on the Train to Chicago

On the stillest days an ordinary orange excoriated;

a stigmatic.

Tennessee Entrance Hall, 1835

Electric sunlight waltzes shadow across an empty entryway;

calculated carelessness in miniature.

Picasso's Study for “La Coiffure”

Two sketches capture the intimacies of women strangers;

The universal truth not bound by temporal constraints.

Unpretentious Fruits of the Midi

One reads the caption to Renoir's “Fruits of the Midi” and wonders

What exactly would a pretentious bowl of fruit look like?

Picasso's Fingerprints

Each grape does contain the arches and ridges of the master;

ripened tips did grace blank pages intimately as the skin of mistresses

Winter Journal Entry

A Brokeback Mountain Valentine:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Sometimes “I wish

I knew how to quit you.”

Daniel Suelo, Jdimytai Damour, and the Price of Our Souls

 “Do you own anything?

Not really. The clothes I wear, the books I use, the car I drive, the house I live in and the money I spend are all provided to support and sustain my life and ministry. I need nothing since we share everything in common. This means if I have a need, it will be provided for by the community.” ---Sister Emma, Sisters of Mercy Website.

“Money only exists if two or more people believe it exists.” Daniel Suelo

Reflection on a Prolonged but Ultimately Failed Romantic Friendship...

It was like wondering why a choose-your-own-adventure book ends the same way every time and then realizing

 it's a novel.

Today Only: Barbie as Status Symbol and Feminine Ideal in Sandra Cisneros’ Short Story “Barbie-Q

      This is a literary response I wrote for my Short Stories class. Responses are informal pieces of writing we usually had a night or two to come up with. This one is one of my favorites because it blends a little bit of memoir into the literary analysis.