Category: poetry

Pinkerton, home, floods

Reading Time: 11 minutes

The next three thousand words are selections of writing I did for a class I had this Fall. I am slowly learning, and hope to return with better pieces to make the most of this. A lot of my writing dealt with religion, home, and expectation. If you read this blog, you’re probably used to that. Thank you for following my journey from my first “chapbook” (not really) to my first college works.

The title comes from the fact that I did delete a Pinkerton reference in the fiction piece, somewhere in the attempt to copy Borges (we read a lot of Le Guin and Borges–the comment was that there was too much extraordinariness in the listing of lives and beings, and I agreed, we have to dwell somewhere more common at times) but without the experience and knowledge to actually understand what a worthwhile life is like, but I’m getting there. I don’t really spend much time publishing or sending out things (I don’t do this at all), but I’ve been writing a lot lately, so here.

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Outside Gate 2.5

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Outside Gate 2.5
Here, I am the rich. I, ilk of captive
grasslands; interim of conversation and
strangers of shared descent. This discomfort

will follow – as oxide stains the validity of
tonsils, leaked of coarse throat, straining,
frugal with desire to be heard. I abuse the

story I come from. Here, a gun asks for a
namesake. His crippled hips grin of a lawless
history, scorned of the 70s. Hands shuffle us

inside. Tell us for a moment, we must finally
scream for our own selves. I, voiceless for
a future, has entanglement clock our sameness,

our waning fear of living. Inside, they pick up
all our mangled selves, sputtered of wax; and so
we become ember, holding onto life again. We

become your voice, ascent to fueling the ends
of times, like gunshots splayed of freefall towards
streets. Here, I am the rich, burdened of word –

further, they tell us not to fight again. Further, they
say we do not seek them. To this I wonder the
requirement of boiling my skin, or piecing apart

the words we give in pursuit of breathing human.
Or, so begins the collection of cardboard. Corrugated
certainty – and we never give the name. Here, wither life

failed of repetitions. History lessons: Hilao, Quimpo,
to which the voice is of wax or prestige – here,
never again.

(Never again.)