A writing friend urged me to submit a chapbook of poems for an open submission. I put together a small collection of jazz poems…

When my brother comes here, he climbs the hill and takes photographs with his phone, mountaingoating around the abandoned barracks on the hunt for abstract shots of graffiti, discolored walls, peeling paint, ancient looking stone circle imprints; then he takes the ferry back to the city and the next day goes to his studio and paints the images onto canvas.

Walking around this year’s Seattle Art Fair, I can’t help but notice Basquiat’s aesthetic infused in many of the paintings.

A quiet reverberation rings a tiny bell inside your body: an instantaneous bounce on white-washed wall from eye to artwork and back; a synapse firing in the brain jumpstarting the heart rate.

You load yourself up with beauty then you bring that out in your art. Piet Oudolf

We find ourselves in amongst a gallery of scrub brush, our morning trio transformed into a clump of stalks undulating in the breeze.

You’ll want to slip past the long line of tourists. Simply flash your invisible “writer” badge and the old man at the gate, susceptible to this Jedi mind-trick, will let you through.

My lane is morphing fast into right-turn only. The truck behind doesn’t see or pay attention to my blinker; just enough time and space to slip in without making the guy hit his breaks, but tight.

Early in Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Eddie S. Glaude Jr recounts paying a visit to James Baldwin’s house in Saint Paul de Vence…

There was a giant wasp suction-cupped to the window. I propped open a porch door to let it escape and headed out with the dogs before heat amassed.

It’s late in the algebra of the day, dogs on their sides; I’m trying to solve for the color blue as the world crashes to the ground in a heap of steel and plastic.