What I’ve been working on…
Below are poems, novels, plays, and essays I’ve been developing. If you’re interested in learning more or if you’re an agent or publisher interested in adopting one of these, please get in touch.
You’re Killing Me
When Grandpa asks Tony to help him out with a problem, Tony agrees without a second thought, but Grandpa is dying of Alzheimer’s, and the problem he wants help with is “checking out.”
Part horror, part superhero origin, The Black Lake opens with both Mickey and Guillermo in the midst of a completely shitty week…
Little Stories
All the villagers decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer, all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella. He didn’t believe in God, but the weather can be unpredictable.
When you throw your babies in the air, they laugh not knowing that at any moment you might suffer a heart attack or a stroke or a stubbed toe.
Every night we go to bed without any assurance of being alive in the morning, but still we set our alarms to wake up. Not everyone has the good fortune to die in their sleep.
We plan big things for tomorrow in spite of our knowledge of the future.
We see the world suffering, but still, we get married and have children because our long-term planning skills are poor, and each of us believes he is the exception rather than the rule.
On an old man's shirt was written a sentence. 'I am not 80 years old; I am sweet 16 with 64 years of experience. Alzheimer's is a bitch.
Everything Collapses in on Itself
(a meditation in the wake of the pandemic)
The bananas I placed in the bowl just two days ago,
black spotted and soft, their skins
wrinkled as pug faces.
The roof, bowed and sagging
as if his lover has been diagnosed with a terminal disease,
cancer or dry rot,
and he’s caught between grief and sex,
and the reality that he cannot leave her
because then, he will really be an asshole…
The dog, merely sleeping,
but looking as though he’s come apart inside,
Dissolved into a pool of furry liquid.
Dog soup.
We are two, diminished bodies
holding tight to shrinking arms and legs.
Breasts and waists wasted away.
Soon we’ll be gone.
Everything will be gone.
The world will contract around us, holding us close, pushing
the banana and the house and the dog
and everyone we’ve loved and everyone
we haven’t loved,
together, into a single point of light or darkness
or whatever we become when the waiting is over.
Everything collapses in on itself.
Even your lungs, filled to bursting with fluid and fibrosis,
the damage and edema of infection,
eventually pull blackly back into the cavern of your body.
Even your swollen flesh recedes like melting ice.
Even the memory of you that lives inside me,
permeating every bone and muscle and joint
shrinks down to the thinnest wisp of pink neurons
launching their tiny fireworks into the darkness.
Maybe death contains its opposite.
Think of the first chemical replication:
amino acids, protein synthesis,
molecules folding and unfolding…
Life from nowhere. Perhaps it’s small to think
nothing doesn’t cradle us to her chest and whisper
sweet somethings in our ears.
That’s the fucking wrench of it.
Even death is small.
Goddamn, it hurts to think about,
how there will be a last time to hear
the perfect mischief of your laugh,
the, “hey you!” on the other end of the phone,
a last time to feel the weight
of you in my arms,
your breath on my cheek,
your hand slipping into mine
in the half-dark of early morning
when you can’t sleep and so,
neither can I.
I guess what I mean to say is I love you.
Everything collapses in on itself:
May fear pass.
May pain diminish.
May desire fade.
May death release us.
May the lives of those we leave behind
be as full as our own.
