The following poems appeared in The World According to Goldfish, Vol. I, Looking Past & The World According to Goldfish, Vol. II, Sight, along with poems by Michael Salcman, Peter Schwartz, Heather Ann Schmidt, Rob Omura, Jim Coppoc, and Alex Lemon. 

Prayer to Encourage the Seizing of the Day

Because the world didn’t end
when the century turned, as my Baptist friend said it would,
I find a seat, become one of the well-packaged humans
on the free bus, wait to depart
from one of the State Fair’s park -n- ride lots.
I tell the woman next to me, who has taken her heels off
replaced them with sneakers and ankle socks,
locked her valuables in the trunk
that I heard, on the radio, on the way over
the lead singer of a band I saw in a bar once
has killed herself for no good reason.
I say, “It’s the same reason every time.”
Over the P.A. loudspeaker employee #340542B
or C cuts in on a song, tells us
remember to hydrate and wear a hat,
report the unusual, the out-of-place. Blind trust
is what we give an underpaid driver to usher us
to a few square miles of public land, where all signs
indicate that neither the woman with the afternoon off
nor I, not having told each other our names,
will be coming away with a story of how we met
on the bus the year the bridge fell.
We’ve become expert at resisting the temptation
to remove our street clothes, to leap from building to building
in a single bound, clutching, instead,
the simpler truth of an armrest,
the fact that all we’ll be today are bodies fattening up
for winter, mind sacs with a looped
reel repeating: cheese curds, corn dogs, pronto pups—
Scotch eggs, mini donuts, troutwurst—Oh
beautiful for spacious skies, land that I love,
save room  for onion fritters, for
pork chops on a stick.

Prayer for Old Fish, Hail to Their Beards
of Monofilament Normal

Lost, I stop to watch a fisherman/woman, can’t tell
in a lake I bet
has big, muddy, lower, green, sandy, duck, or bullhead
in its name, isn’t one of the lucky lakes
with an Ojibway name.
I roll the window down, tell Odysseus
I have no idea what gifts
I owe to the gods of the lovely breeze.
The fisherman/woman is reeling something
reelworthy in, chose the bait
fish couldn’t resist, can tell children
that to understand the difference
between a minnow and a leech
sing the song everybody’s singing.
Try to do the same
with its B side. The logic of 45s
enters the digital age in the suburbs
where I’m late to meet up for lunch
looking for the bar
with the orange moose out front. Sirens
in the not-so-distant distance
don’t even attempt
to turn me into meat-of-perch
alive in a body of water less than half an hour ago,
somebody’s shore lunch. In the Circe version of my future
I’m eating a corn pancake
with a side of black beans, drinking
a cold Hatuey,
never having found the orange moose
but having convinced myself
Jules, Joseph, Cindy, and Susan
will forgive me
driving back to the city, walking the three blocks
from my place to Victor’s, ordering
the usual, texting them this
in installments.

The Moon Tonight Inspires Not Only Wonder and Tides
But Also This Deathbedish Prayer

It lands on and blocks the road in front of me, more
Jupiter than moon. I look
left, right: I’m in a room
wallpapered with cottonwoods.
The moon is rolling a carpet out,
it’s made of pregnant light . . . I call it that, driving
into it I say the pregnant light
is bleaching the trees.
I leave the car door open, key in the ignition. The finders
of abandoned things will think, What happened
happened quick. This was an emergency.
I kill a mosquito, and as instinctively
as I do so am sorry for what I’ve done,
that I am shadow, man, can’t
dismantle the border between.
I breathe in whatever the night
exhales. It’s like I’m making out
with lilacs and moon.
I sit with my back against a tire,
get on the hood,
absorb the engine’s heat
until I feel like the one solid thing
at the heart of a nebula.
I get down from the hood clumsily, forget
I inhabit a mass others can see,
put my head back, settle into the contours
of the ditch. Waiting would be different
if I had never read that the pull
of the right kind of body
in the right conditions, given time, is enough
to draw everything to a center.
It would be different, I’m telling you, if the moon
were saying anything other than take
an inventory, invent a tool.

Prayer to Bestow a Blessing on a City, First Visit There

The Neanderthals wrote their histories in soft wood,
passed along their cosmologies in gestures. Me
I’m trying to do something as ephemeral as that
for the inventor of the red light, for the genius conceiver
of the DON’T WALK sign, for the time they’ve given
me to figure out that city rightly considered
is a contraction of gravity, code for the inward pull
of humans in binary pairs. It’s black-holish
this falling in on myself, wondering
if after death we’re allowed to crowd
the one-consciousness kiln, mob the gates
or if we must go in an orderly fashion, one
at a time, buck-naked, no assurance
lovers will and enemies won’t
be fused together. After an overpriced
but expense-able lunch alone, on the streets
of a downtown unstrange in its echo of the Platonic
form for town square, peculiar, though, in its execution—
too many pharmacies, no tobacconists—
no longer wearing the mask I wear for business
one blonde stone set among the darker rest
at the top center of the building overshadows me.
The builder, rather than leaving his name,
as was fashionable, etched only 1883
into its face. I cross the street, address a partly cloudy sky
with only my eyes, ask how many of us, once all that’s left
of us is a body, must be melded together
to make a brick? My toes in my shoes
in my socks, shackled and enslaved
sadly attempt the midair pose
made famous by cliff divers on postcards.
Take a countenance and remove its skull
you have a building façade. Next to the revolving
door’s hydra of bullet-proof tongues, face to face
with a building ready to eat me, I kiss a brick
warmed by sun, just to taste it.