Hey y'all, I'm very very stoked to have two prose poems in Tarpaulin Sky Magazine
They've been one of my very favorite presses and magazines since around 2013 or 14. The amount of books they've put out that I have in love and is well into the double digits, so suffice it to say they're one of my favorite places to have work in. For "Into the Mall for the Light of It," I wrote the poem while living at a crummy apartment behind the University Mall in Temple Terrace, Florida. On my days off (Thursdays and Sundays), I would take walks into the University mall. It was a dying mall and I remember running into either a white ibis or a sandhill crane every time I walked into the parking lot. They would just stare at walkers and cars alike, daring them to do something. Pit those confluences against the third season of the TV show Twin Peaks and the surreal prose poems of Marosa Di Giorgio and I was definitely in a good place for some weird, gothic scribbling. The figure in the first poem, "In the Second-long Stretch of the Second Night," was actually inspired, in part, by someone who I knew from Temple Terrace as well,
Hope you enjoy them!