OFFERING
The peace offering
from our shadow-deficient twins
was a bomb,
everyone’s elicit enthusiasm erased
by the explosion
televised live,
living rooms all across
the world
filled with a light
stranger than the sun
no one thought to look at anymore,
George Salis: You have two new novels out since 2018, The Pleasures of Queueing and Night of the Long Goodbyes. The former novel was published first so technically it is your debut, but which one is your first novel? Also, how do these novels compare and contrast? Are they in conversation with each other or totally disparate?
Continue reading “Climatic Exile: An Interview with Erik Martiny”
I noticed the symptoms after my last surgeries: gastric E-Zpass, electroshock of my kidneys, gallbladder flush & fill, and liver elasticity test. Dr. Ming Gulah was the surgeon. Even though he is on the FAA ‘No Fly List,’ he came highly recommended. The operating room lost power halfway through my procedure, but I was told they were able to compensate by utilizing two car batteries and a giant hamster wheel, which the intern spun. I was discharged three minutes after the operation. They wheeled me outside to the bus stop with a map pinned to my gown, since I couldn’t talk. I arrived home three weeks later missing my gown, wallet, and cell phone. I felt fine even though I was vomiting blood and my skin was a purplish-green color. For my recovery process, I was given: a bottle of vodka, roll of duct tape, and Vicodin, which was secured under the gurney mattress to avoid theft and misuse.
Continue reading “Fix”
Gumball Blue
“War,” the little girl says, “is when papa is gone.” If you look out the window, you too might see the horizon line fizzing like a lighted fuse. It began years ago. More and more words were allowed to choose their own meaning, and now we find ourselves surrounded by random fragments of abstruse codes. Don’t you think it’s time for a gumball machine that dispenses eyeballs? Everything else has failed – duty, honor, country. We need to have a conversation, decide on a plan, something, before unfamiliar birds visit us in our sleep, stripping dream bushes of every last berry.
The Babies Born
Where was the man?
No ants in his pants.
No motion in his flawless body.
He was checking on the babies born.
George Salis: What has influenced you then and what influences you now?
Continue reading “Hungrily Poetic: An Interview with Barton Smock”
He looks out across his resplendent city in the glowing sunrise and sees the sacred sun silhouette the Temple of Tlaloc and Huītzilōpōchtli. Will the latter god save them from the annihilation in his recent dreams, or had the war god grown sick of the priests’ gifts of gory hearts and flayed corpses? Had he decided to do the unthinkable and abandon the Mexica to darkness, famine and extinction? The dawn sun basks the sky in a fiery orange. The water of Texcoco scintillates in the light, and the causeways reach out to the world beyond Tenochtitlan, from where the strangers with metal skin and moveable volcanoes for weapons will deceive him and raze his kingdom to the ground.
Continue reading “Quetzalcoatl Comet”
Narcotics of Narcissism
Don’t stare at your reflection
too long, Tim;
you may turn into a knife for yourself.
Cirque du Soleil
You were a failed experiment
on my living room carpet
two nights after the earthquake.
George Salis: I consider you something of a superhero, championing the underdogs of literature who have been wrongly neglected. And so, what is the superhero origin story of Tough Poets Press, does it involve radioactive spiders, gamma rays, mutant genes?
Continue reading “Thrill of the Hunt: An Interview with the Founder of Tough Poets Press”
The Collidescope 