A Review of Badlands @ Smack Mellon Gallery in DUMBO

The border is a ghost town. On the one hand, it is an intimate portrait of the unfriendly, almost menacing topography of this region, and on the other, a charged political statement. The end of the wall is a bisected overpass of a highway that begins and ends in mid-air. In contrast, the beginning of the border resembles the badlands, an almost primeval landscape. It eventually evolves into civilization, the floating highway— yet both look dangerous.

5 Cantos in Late September @ Atticus Review

I think he fell out of bed at the nursing home because he was really at the beach in Ft. Lauderdale, just north of Las Olas Boulevard, and south of Sunrise. This was his favorite spot, old school Florida– the Jolly Roger Hotel, and the Parrot; a tiki bar for locals. He was at the shoreline in a hospital bed, just as the sun was coming up, facing south, and sitting up. Instead of being in some institutional nursing home, he was at the beach. And he just got up, and walked away, headed north. On earth– his body fell out of bed. And that was the end. The rest was pro forma. Maybe his heart kept beating, but — really, he was at the beach, smoking a Marlboro Light, and a having a coffee. And he knew he was dead, and said, glad that shit’s over.

Beautiful Girl on a Distant Planet @ FOLKS Magazine

I liked the idea, metaphorically, of an interplanetary being. The whole star man ethos was definitely in the air for us. I was reading Edgar Cayce, the American mystic, at the time, and my boyfriend was practicing to see if he could astral project in his sleep at night. I wrote poetry about Bozling, and Kathy sketched pictures of him; a spaceman with antenna, alone, on a cold planet, not unlike the hero in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

The Changeling @ Full Grown People

She arrives after a twenty-five-year absence in our brother’s life; a seeker, a philosopher, convinced she can carry the weight of his impending death, that she could, in fact, be his angel of death. Like Charon, she has the gold piece for passage in her teeth at all times. She is both midwife and doula for the dying. Our first night together, at the all-night grocery store, Mark wears flannel pajama bottoms, white socks, flip-flops. His eye sockets are purple under the canopy of fluorescent lights. She’s Martha Stewart on crack.