Tag Archives: Kentucky

2026, essay, fiction, Louisville Stories, Ohio River Valley Literature, summer

Beautiful Flowers, Old Trees – A short essay on change

 

Flowers on the west-facing fence line that will not die in spite of the vines.

The backyard is perpetually an overgrown mess. It just is. I have good intentions and we have, in years past, had a pretty decent and thriving garden. Our backyard in the tight little neighborhood where me and my wife live is ringed on two sides by large maple and oak trees: one of which hangs over our house like the Sword of Damocles, the other of which is half dead and both of which share the fence line with our easterly neighbor, Larry and his adult son Matthew, who through sheer attrition has risen to be the Sketchiest Person on the Block.

The other tree is an old oak in the alley behind our house that isn’t really an alley, and at night in July the long overhanging branches are littered with lightening bugs. Because our house is built on what is technically a swamp and this is the lower Ohio River Valley, we get mosquitoes, but don’t spray them because killing the mosquitoes would also kill off the lightening bugs. That tree is largely healthy.

The Rose of Sharon that returned.

After a storm last summer, Matthew hired his then buddies who lived on the other side of him, a rotating collection of tweakers who were either burning shit in the backyard or curating a rotating gallery of meth-fueled art in the same backyard made from “found” electronic devices, to cut down a tree limb the wind had taken down. One of the three conversations I’ve ever had with Larry was to point out that there was nothing to keep them from suing him if they were injured, and that they’d probably win. He only smiled and said “I just got them to sign a piece of paper saying they can’t sue me if they’re dead.”

After they finished cutting it down, the tweakers then tossed it over the fence and into our yard, effectively destroying the fence (that has still not been repaired) and damaging the Rose of Sharon tree, which was one of my favorites. I cut up the log and propped up the fence a bit so the dogs wouldn’t try to wander. It’s not enough.

Every spring I aspire to a yard that is beautiful and practical. I want this more for Amanda than for myself, but for myself, too. She’s got the green thumb and I think if I could clear it all out and clean it up and erect a tall enough fence to keep the tweakers from stealing from our garden, that I might be ok with Matthew and his mini archery and axe throwing range that he sets up too close to the shared fence line. But then spring turns into summer and fall is knocking on the door,  and I end up feeling a little disappointed in myself.

Along the back fence on in the shade of the tree that grows in the alley.

But there’s always little bits of beauty and death around that remind me this season will not last and that there’s always next year.

I’m lousy at a curated garden and I know it. But the tweakers are gone and there aren’t nearly the number of random fires being set in our tightly squeezed little neighborhood.  Transformation is an ongoing process, right? Apathy can be a plan of its own.

 

 

 

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2026, Day Book, Haiku, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry

body remedies: 3 haiku on the first day of spring

1.
song sparrows and ants
promises of the season
call, march this new day

2.

the dogs, being kind
let me sleep in -- grace
is best unspoken

3.

body remedies:
hot coffee, fresh air
a cold face wash

[Daybook 2026: Spring 3.20.26]

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2026, Day Book, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, poetry, prose, the no-scape, winter

Daybook 2026 /Winter 2.9.26

The river is frozen but no one really thinks it will thaw, except maybe the old captains no one listens to, anyway, and the engineers, who no one sees until something breaks. This is not the new ice age, but the same old one on repeat. In the age of streaming no one remembers shows getting syndicated. After 100 shows you’d find your favorite prime time show playing between after school cartoons and the 6 O’clock news in situ in perpetuity, until one day, perpetuity runs out.

The current in situ perpetuity will run out, too.

I participated in a lovely reading celebrating the life and memory of Beat ingenue, Neal Cassady. He’s the latest to get rehabbed and retconned, having finally been acknowledged for the influence he had over the work of Kerouac, who’s probably been watered down and worked over enough. Of course they light candles to Neal now that he’s dead, long dead and beyond being able to spend the royalties on a pack of smokes,a pull of whiskey, a crisp, cold beer, or a damn hamburger with all the fixin’s. But it’s important in this time of having to again define what it means to be from the United States, what it means to want to make art, what it means when you want your life to be art, to be a poem, in these the falling days of the Post-American Century. It’s important to remember that somewhere in the heart of all this mass-medificated misinformation we bleed for more than just dollars and dream of more than to be the latest anti-social media influencer. 

I am trying to remember what it means to be part of a community again; it used to feel something like second nature, but I have stripped myself down to component parts and am rebuilding again. It’s good to remember our literary and otherwise roots, good to know where we’ve come from because that helps tell us where we’re going.  I can never get over feeling awkward, wandering into readings like gunslinger, all alone with a holster of poems and a stomach full of rage that I keep hearing needs to be love

being told so by people who do not understand they are the exact same thing.

a motor
is an easy bit
of tech
transforms
the in
visible
into
work
motion
a spinning pinion
a fan a flywheel
a few words
a poem
like ol; Doc
(William Carlos)
Williams said



I meant to read some poems from my forthcoming collection, The Call Sign is Jonah, but instead dug out an 11-year-old poem, “A Few Lines for Ernesto Cardenal,” one of my favorite Latin American Poets: poet, priest, Sandinista, who prayed for the troops before they went off to fight the CIA backed death squads supporting Somoza. He would eventually break from them when Ortega took over the party and turned into the same kind of bloody dictator that Somoza was. He was, like Whitman, a pure American Poet: American in the sense that the entire western Hemisphere is America, and not just the United States. So I read from an old poem, written nine years before his death. Had I known he was in Cincinnati in 2011, I might have tried to go and see him, but I was drunk somewhere in a northern tundra, waiting for a marriage to die and spitting words at the fascists sitting on the country board.

Here at home, the Mayor McPhoto Op is continuing his clean city campaign by attacking unregistered donation boxes. When he goes after the little libraries, will the conservative party finally embrace him for what he is?

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