Update About the Airgonaut

I've published for the last couple of years an online journal called The Airgonaut. I've placed a submission closed update there this afternoon due to the fact that I'm finished with editing for the time being.

Since 2002 I've been editing literary journals - Cellar Door Magazine, The Wrong Tree Review, A-Minor, Metazen, Night Train, Revolution John, and now The Airgonaut. I think 15 years is enough time for me to have given back to writers by publishing and championing their work.

Now, at 41 years of age and not healthy enough to foresee a life into my 70s or 80s, I'd like to spend the remainder of my time as a writer working on the few of my projects currently on the table.

For the time being, I'll publish the work that has already been accepted at The Airgonaut. This will constitute monthly issues covering October, November, and December. After that, who knows? But it's been fun. Thanks to you all for the solid work and for the chance to share it with readers. That was really cool of you. The archives will, of course, be available from now until doomsday.

Buddha Rat

I.

Someone

will read this and think,

they’ll be thinking,

thinking awfully hard, 

Who is this? What is this moving toilet of words?

II.

There are rats

everywhere in this house.

Five or six creek rats.

Thick tails, oily bodies, all the things

you’re thinking about rats, probably.

They squeal and stomp

inside the fireplace, in and out and in holes

they’ve chewed into the sheetrock,

low to the floor where the trim should be.

But rats. Rats by mountain load.

III.

And still this moving toilet of words.

That toilet

full of rats that write in cursive

threats across my walls

inside of my skull. Nothing makes me feel better.

Not even X-Files.

IV.

I hate the way

my face looks.

Drooped, unsacred, tired in a way separate

from drooped, scarred, stroke-drooped,

cigarette-old, tortured-young,

sagging, envious.

My face is a rat. I’m like a swollen rat.

Like the swollen rat in a trash

can full of rainwater at the end of my house

that I will never ever touch

and will leave forever placed where it is rotting. 

Filicide Muse

I sense you are religiously unhappy with me

so don't call the alligator

big mouth til you cross the river.^[1]

Alligators look

kind of like birds so

all birds look like chickens to me.^[2]

I always liked to see my

stepdad kiss my mom.

I wanted them to love each other.

Let me be your filicide muse;

we will fight in the shade^[3]

round the basement of my soul.

I’m more of a whatever.

I’m more of a

God’s incest jam.^[4]

---

^[1] A line from the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven. It’s a part where they’re crossing some country apparently rife with Comanche. Not sure which character said it, but it wasn’t Vincent D’Onofrio, who played, by far, the coolest character. I guarantee you he thought of that voice for his character on his own.

^[2] From a song by Sweet Papa Stovepipe, which I was turned onto while reading Michael Robbins’s Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music.

^[3] From the film 300 and beautifully and badassedly said in response to this line: “Our arrows will blot out the sun.”

^[4] My revised version of a comment made by Jereny Tackett after reading Cy Est Pourtraicte Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges by Wallace Stevens. I can’t write what his original comment was here for the same reason I can’t right it above. We all fall victim to censorship from time to time, even if it is self-inflicted. But I do hate myself for it. So you know.

It's American Horror Story Time *smiley insane face*

So I just watched the intro scene for American Horror Story season 7 and it's the scariest one yet. The gang at AHS were exactly on target for displaying in fiction the terror of our current reality with that guy as president.

Nokemon

These are my goodling shoes.

She probably has some kind of woodpecker cushion brain

A posthumous existence^[1]

Floating in a butterfly’s eye.

A Pavlovian rock hound.

Do you play Pokemon Go? Nokemon.^[2]

Nine inch nails of snow.

Sing for me as you once did when the river caught your tongue.^[3]

Happy birthday, Spraynard. I’m disappointed in you.^[4]

---

^[1] John Keats in a letter describing how his life seemed during the bout of sickness that would eventually take his life at the fair age of 25. Later, he would yell at those around him, asking when his posthumous existence would be over.

^[2] From one of those Facebook questionnaires asking if I play Pokemon Go. This was my answer, trying to be as clever as I could on social media.

^[3] From the television show Taboo. In episode one of the first season, Tom Hardy’s character, James Delaney, says this while having hallucinations of dead people coming back to life to try to kill him.

^[4] A line from Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show. The episode, from season one and called “Dads,” involved a prank phone call during which Tim said his son’s name was Spray, short for Spraynard. Later the two sentences used in this poem were put on a wall in decoration for Spraynard’s birthday party. 

Categorically Red Dragon

The last 11 emails in my inbox are from me to me,

But I stay categorically Red Dragon.^[1]

Shaquille O’ Neal is our greatest philosopher and

Mrs. Templeton isn’t very discreet these days, now is she?^[2]

If I’d been the janitor at my old high school

I would have been a child killer, a surreal killer.

But I stay categorically less than Geoffrey Hill^[3]

so maybe just publish me at 22.^[4]

Among adolescents the desire to be extraordinary becomes commonplace,^[5]

a perfect missile of feces.

They looked like somebody had been kicking them all day.

Shived and slashed and bootstomped, mostly in the face.

---

^[1] The title of a 1981 novel by Thomas Harris, which portrayed a character (a serial killer) who was obsessed with the painting of William Blake’s called “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun.” Harris’s novel also inspired a bad 1986 movie called Manhunter starring the amazing Brian Cox and then later the much better 2002 movie Red Dragon starring the even more amazing Ralph Fiennes.  

^[2] From The Twilight Zone episode “The Trouble with Templeton” in which Templeton is getting screwed around on by his wife and doesn’t really all that much care which makes my stomach sort of do flips and get all blechy-like.

^[3] An English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language,” according to the godlike keeper of information Wikipedia.

^[4] Hill was first published at the age of 20 when poet Donald Hall, then poetry editor of The Paris Review, accepted his poem “Genesis” for the second issue of that fabled journal.

^[5] A quote from the poet Donald Hall who is paraphrasing a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. No need to go into Holmes’s exact quote, as anything Hall edits must be better than the original.