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When my daughter was a newborn, I found I only had the attention span to write micro and flash; I wrote a lot of it. I was also sleeping very little at night and crashed most afternoons, which for me is when the weirdest dreams happen. “NotRob” was one of them.
This poem was born after a strange empathy opened my eyes to Matthew 12:43-45—the Bible passage where Jesus teaches about demons wandering in the wilderness after a demon-possessed man is healed. Here, I tried to capture the persona’s body as a living space.
This one is a ghost poem whose subject was only ever alive on film: Johnny Ryan, played stone cold and queer to the bone by Wendell Corey in the deliriously Technicolor noir Desert Fury (1947). He haunts the end of the film and kept on haunting me past it.
The rituals of witchcraft are intended to control outcomes. Being able to fly is often perceived as freedom, but it also threatens a loss of self-control. I wanted to write about the moment when dream becomes nightmare and explore how a ritually minded person endeavors to make sense of it.
We hear you laughing as you speed by on the interstate. In spite of what you might think of us, we are a proud town. We don’t need your understanding. We don’t explain. You couldn’t handle the answers.
This is a retelling of a Chinese folktale that I couldn’t get out of my head. It’s been through a lot of revisions. The two things that helped it come into its final form were cutting half the word count, and finding a voice for the main character that suggests that the horror is not only in what is happening, but those who might be complicit in the act.
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