To be published in Half and One Literary Magazine in Fall, 2026.

The Angel at the Garden Gate

Are we leaving then?
Do co-emergent particles also have hands to hold?
Unlikely, but let’s at least make an attempt
to share the flow, to rise in a common wind.
I’ll be your character witness.  I’ll testify the snake
made you and made you do it, then made up our leaving.
 
But you’re staying, aren’t you…
You’ll FaceTime by the tree, by the river,
by the fields of nightshade, never left out
in the bioluminescent light, the light’s light,
and long green rows of ease. Your hollowed healing.
Which is not mine.  Never was, although I abused it for flight.
 
I asked for rescue.  You showed pics of garden flowers.
I mined the singularity.  You showed pics of garden flowers.
I wore the skins of black holes. You showed pics of garden flowers.
I scoffed at the falconer’s call. You didn’t even bother.
So by the sacred law of the inventor of the firmaments
it made sense to me that you stay and I withdraw.
 
Is my road map then a restraining order? A handful of dust
thrown at the raddled Ganges, the conjuring roots
of the Amazon, the Nile with its baskets of prophets.
The fluvial credit card with its enshitified rituals
wanting to buy your love.  No, buying love for you,
I know how this works.  I ate the apple long before you.
 
There, something circles the pearl-white sky above
our garden home, our blue dot reminder of infinite emptiness.
O but so many snakes in Plato’s hip hop cavities of stone.
In that darkness, your darkness I open the cages of love.
Out extemporize the owl, the falcon, an inefficient raven.
Two hawk-like alpha predators and a silly tramp, hungry and alone.
 
The unheld multitude of wings musses our hair. Not selfie-ready at all.
(Each tendril pulled to its form; green, brown, then grey streaks).
O raptors of this rupture, you present such soft solutions, possible ends. 
Your collection of shining black wings and bloody beaks opens
each wound oozing roses in the fucking garden of self-consciousness.
It wasn’t denial, our sin of record. It was intentional perception.
 
Now the scriptures are also click-bait. Like the baffling “co-emergent”
reference used earlier.  This whole poem uses us.  From here
there is no science nor art that does not claim to see us.
The time away from time.  The pretense. What does not baffle?
The artifice of claims, the proud strut of knowing good and evil.
As though abetting a god we made in our heads makes
 
a speck of difference. Who forgives specks?
 
I hate this part the most. Saying good bye to you who stays.
It’s time to duck under the flaming sword of Manjushri.
(I must admit I’d thought it’d be you. But all creation myths
have twists.) It cuts down the weeds at these last doors of deception.
Mustard flowers fall to fire and their seeds dry in my long sleep.
The sword and flames find four directions and warn there is a fifth.
 
And what you hear is wind, not calls to return. Time to make a path
and pretend it is poetry. Caminantes on a pilgrimage to simple loneliness.
Cerberus’s barking does not say flee, it pleads “come to me.”
Everything depends on life chickening out in paradise lost.
What we so desperately listen for is desire, and so miss the birdsong.
Purifying birdsong, celestial and healing, isn’t a lie. The birds smell us.
 
O Majushri, in your wisdom, slice off the cancers in our world of ideas.
Harvest what is left of us, take the best of the Garden, the seeds
that survive false Giants, an egg or two, for the floods of remission.
I offered my body in that last paradise and was found wanting,
I dreamed the truth, or I saw the truth when I dreamed, I dreamed.
I slept away the obstructions and still the shadows let me sin.
 
We are of the same substance as the trees. I pocket the sacred plants
and am pulled out of your arms; you left behind with roots and rivers
and the fallen bodies, broken and leveraged to assist the living
end, in a time of names, an overanalysis, an accounting
of the myriad forms of both good and evil. I know, I know.
I cannot return to the tree. Why possibly would I want to? You.
 
The way ahead shines. It shines enough.
Birds, birds… the morning again. A fucking dove.  Are you kidding?
Another chance at reinvention, a profile and a screen,
a new shot at storytelling with sunlight plot twists, with bird offal
falling on the dust outside the gate; determine their portent
to praise this song of suspense for a god who is not an accountant.
 
We are pissed the garden shrinks us,
we are humbly pissed and we are truly sorry.
We made things die
on our watch.  The god that expels us was
what we made up after school. On the playground, online.
The sacred sounds of a sword ending us. Exile is our freedom.
 
The birds, the bloody birds,
will not stop forgiving us.

 To be published in Glassellland Lit Mag in Fall, 2026.

Just Another Hollywoodland Pilgrim’s Progress

When I was a boy the hills
told me things, set limits
and promised mysteries that surely
must exist on the other sides.
Two rows of hills shepherding
the Arroyo Seco to a distant sea.
The San Gabriels holding the smog
like a mother holding a child. Elysian Park
protecting Frog Town life from the Dodgers
and Clifton’s Cafeteria, with its tropical holy land.
 
But I want to tell you about my father
who attended UCLA when it was on Vermont
and then Westwood, who drove the only
long way from Hermon’s small valley to
the expanse of beanfields and Spanish colonial
suburbs that puffed up around Royce Hall.
Later, when Dad had a family, he drove me
periodically over that hill, the huge ice cream cone
announcing we were leaving childhood,
over the hill into the city of traffic,
of  The Akron with records of Jewish folksongs
and teak patio geegaws from no place ever heard of,
past the Vermont campus and Pilgrimage Theater,
through the movie palaces where Dad and I saw Ben Hur
and El Cid, past Westwood, to the other hills --
the Palisades before the coast. There Dad stopped. There
were no more hills, only the ocean. But I knew then and now
he wanted to keep driving. Out of the coat and tie
popping a Doublemint in his mouth to thoughtfully chew,
and the white t-shirt making a farmer’s tan on
his strong left arm. His car, capable of climbing hills
and starting pilgrimages, changed him. And
changed me.

 My fourth short story published.  The Practice of Stopping Practice in Wordgathering: A journal of Disability Poetry and Literature in summer 2026, published by Syracuse University. 

They had warned him.  When Sam died folks told him it was important to stay active, to stay engaged in activities outside the house, to make sure he didn’t “isolate.”   He appreciated this advice, but it felt to him as observations made from outside his life.  And from the inside he observed that no one invited him to any activity with them.  They were Sam’s friends, and so the connections with them died with Sam.  The last time he would see most of these friends was at the memorial service.  A service of Buddhist prayers for arrival in the Pure Land for Sam, a lapsed and crusty Methodist. 

 

(cont.)

 Three poems to be published in the September, 2026 issue of The Chiron Review Literary Journal

Desperados in Eden

You said I wanted a muse,

then declined the opportunity.

So I write this poem without you.

Then I asked you to climb a tree with me.

You still demurred, in a piqued and impish way.

No worries, I said, I am more snake than tree.

“Surrender your leaves!”, you said ahead of kindness.

You did not see my snakeskin shadow.

And as for apples? We both picked fruit up off our ground. 

So I made leaves in one damn hurry

and handed them to you in buckets of rain.

You illuminated the mortgage and took the wheel again.

“Document your shadow, fess up to your creation!”

Oh I am a constant autumn, I confessed,

and you will run from the winter mess ahead, ahead.

A sly miracle then happened, and you burned the wet leaves 

for our warmth. You said, “this happens to me all the time”,

and suddenly I saw we were naked.  At last. 

The Throttle in Your Hands

Wings are poetic, don’t you think?

Flight and air and a sustained survival

do appeal to all.

But here’s a story of my sinking.

You see, the plane of desire broke 

the glass to cause the fire.

Since what was wanted was the dramatic end.

The rickety plane collected the trash 

and alphabet and then turned off its engines.

The sky-written smoke soon became flames.

The book in the pocket blamed solar flares

(but I knew Prometheus was just looking for a hook up.)

A miracle, I say.  The Sage of smoke held up the secret

lyric we all sing and pulled on the throttle. He navigated my neuroses

to a safe landing. The wings and plane still standing,

by standing still.  Don’t you think

neurosis is a tired shame? Viennese couches

and ashtrays filled with butts.

But who am I to dispute the man

who saved me from my fatal descent -

given all the weather reports raging in my nutty heart.

I promise I’ll stutter vowels and consonants no longer.

Permit me voyage love, wherever patterns never land.

Emergencies, in friendly hands, are how our lives restart.

Antichrist on the Playa

From Midwest farms to crosstabs 

on the weedy table of Love

he brings an urgent torrent of speech.

Each phoneme takes its place

inside me. Perhaps not as I intended.

After all, the sermon was his to mount.

Perhaps more than he pretended,

he planted the sweetest doubts.

Though his intentions were to scale, 

a cult of desperation still grew. 

I wonder if I can hold his size.

I wonder if desire has my vision blurred.

Blessed are the chronologists. Who knew?

The chakra I had expected to burn deferred

to the chakra that holds my feisty surrender.

Then the Fallen Angel butt-dialed the Antichrist.

So I am ready for what’s next.

I want this prize. To scoff at the off-brand Logos.

Post-evangelism clean up in the cemetery.

The Word’s own budding influencer

preaches outside St. Peter’s

to tell me to remember to say please.

But a rich man can’t go through the eye of the needle

unless he is on his knees.

 To be published in the Spring, 2026 issue of Lit Magazine

Comparing My Inside to Your Outside at the Water’s Edge

We watch a rising tide together. We avoid the salty foam chugging up to our knees. But we welcome ebbing, with its slick metaphors and clickbait embarrassments. We entangle at the breakwater sitting cheek by jowl on top of the riprap, on these rocks quarried from the channel islands, Anacapa and Santa Cruz.  I look at you, my oldest friend, and see a brotherhood of strangers. I admire your handsome profile and my guts ask for the blessings of impermanence.

You point to the angry undertow swirling outside the marina, you point to the wind rocking the boats, ringing their lines against masts. I say, the flow that can be seen is not the real flow. I look at your frown lines and I think you seem annoyed with me, with my declaiming and lack of precision.  You read my mind and say, “I don’t think this is a question of metaphysics, of proposing strategies -- it’s better to watch thought bubbles float by in the wind of this one and precious human life” “Better than what?”, I ask

I turn away from you, outwards, to a southwest swell, one continuous rumble of big waves falling on the introduced rock -- the wide ocean wants all its shore back, wants what’s protected inside this seawall. We sit looking across the marina, at the hills inland -- but I know this is the wrong view, the wrong view forever obscuring the right view out to what we loosely call “horizon.”  A sloop slides to the end of the world. We want to be that boat. We call this pose our Truth in the messy shallowness of our dry and mundane social media profiles, our performative pictures floating by in the regatta of self-doubt… only in some better universe does anyone know that our crafted and artful images are like the blinking of a kidnap victim – in the press conferences of algorithmic ack ack we telegraph a fear deeper than history.  Help me, help me. Each drop of torture asks for a relief from how much better you look like a happy human than I do. 

The waves hit the breakwater again, making my pretentions fall off the edge of the world while you seem to breathe a ransom into being.  Sitting beside me you sigh and I make a guess it’s a melodrama of exclusion, an homage to the syntax errors we wrap in plastic for all this wet beauty.  How can I resist your truth, your beauty? I shudder with the sun and turn away from the green flash. I reach inside me, to the storehouse of loathing, and I curate a darkness.  Your elite satisfactions lift the marina into my obituary: he was afraid of every drop of life, every rustle of the oak trees on these same hills. He bought a round of drinks for strangers.  He lied ceaselessly. His feet were a lamp to the world.  The world never knew.

We take a selfie for posterity. It evaporates immediately. We walk on the beach beside the marina. Your tide is pulling out. Kelp is left on the sand.  It will dry by morning.

To be published in the Winter, 2026 issue of The Fourth River Literary Journal

Amor Fati

I was drifting in a boat.
Then, in the middle of
this wide blue river,
the water asked me
an impertinent question --
it wanted to know
the scope of its banks,
the curve and reach,
the cut and alluvion,
the pace and gathering volume
that might lift the
bankfull to a place
where, even as guided by gravity,
it would not outlast time.
 
The middle of the river
wanted to know if the end
might be ahead,
if the next bend of this slow
and sinuous meandering
might turn to a murky delta
bleeding to the sea.
 
Water, as is its nature,
lets questions sink in.
It does not want answers --
the favor is in the asking.
 
But in this frail boat
I am too solid still.
I can’t circumvent answers.
So I tell the water
“from this oxbow
we’ll flow to the dark mother --
her arms holding us under.”
I am inundated with answers.
 
Uncertain hands cup
the rising waters in the bilge of the boat,
water not yet brackish,
and not yet from the sea.
I am thinking that bailing alone
could keep us afloat.
But better, perhaps, to learn
to love the sinking.

 

Finishing Line Press chapbook now available for preorder.  Hard copies published in May, 2026.