The Finch at the Feeder

Today as a Stick in Bicycle Spokes

I want to throw an icy snowball at a stranger and hit them right in the bridge of their nose. Chew rare meat with my mouth open. Grow thorns and be held. I want isolation in the post-apocalyptic sense. I want to pull a tooth. Today is wrought-iron twisted by the elements into something obscene. Today is a lie you heard years ago and still believe. Today is a cannibal best friend. Gnash, weep, repeat. I am the unapologetic patron saint of the pitiful, the at-the-bar-aloners, the gluggers of good scotch. I am a vandalized zoo. Animals free from their cages, dumbfounded by each others' habitats, lashing out in bewilderment. There is protocol for anger, even rage. Same for jealousy and hate. But when a creature is off-kilter, unsure, thrown out of balance--everything is possible. From the dark grab-bag of instinct and action, there is no anticipating what the hand might come out with.

December 21


She left on the solstice

and ever since, I’ve been exhausted.

I fall asleep at lunch,

head pressed hard and red on the cafeteria

table, hand holding the fork that rests

in the rice pilaf. There is no one

term for my kind of heaviness. I step through afternoons

in a space suit, everyone eyes me

like I am the alien. Where is home?

The quarter-waxing gibbous. The harvest.

The blue. There are still moons I haven’t kissed

her under. Bareness, obviously. The easy metaphor,

the solar system as a sterile womb. When did the night sky

become impenetrable? Storm clouds in mourning, dressed up to grieve.

Loss is never singular. Often, the death of one star is the end

of an entire constellation.

“It’s all a draft until you die.”
–Ellen Bryant Voigt


For breakfast I had fruit crepes with cream cheese and toast. Steak and eggs. Biscuits and brown gravy. A grapefruit divided—sliced in midair and sugared over. It is all a draft until you die? Of course it is. Revision is constant—as endless as sex can seem, when you’re doing it right—and fundamentally self-propelling. The facts are relative things that aren’t half as important as Entertainment Value. I think I heard that on the news.

I read the words “Final Draft” and laugh. I think of 8th grade history class, a weekly paper on any significant event. What could we do but rewrite the past?

The truth is, I feel like I’m drowning. The fact is, I’ve been fighting for the waterline since I first put the pen to the page. Some days I’m in a rental chair, reclining with a mojito I mixed myself. Others, I’m barefoot, running for a Frisbee someone threw me. I always hope it was my father, but he’s revising, too.

Anything can be unmade. Kafka wanted everything burned. Dickinson lived at the bottom of a drawer. The best is never the best. It’s what floats up to the surface after being washed over, over, over.

For over a decade I’ve written the same poem in three hundred and forty-five ways. I’ve taken a red pen to every one. No one will say it, but we need it there. The carrot, rotting on the string, hanging out in front of our faces. If we caught it, wouldn’t we stop moving? Get a real job? Settle down?

The Night, The Porch

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing---
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us much, and was never written with us in mind.

Here are some quotes by one of the bestselling authors of all time. I'm sure you'll see why.


Well, when I was 13, for my bar mitzvah I received my first typewriter. And that was special.


I used to get a haircut every Saturday so I would never miss any of the comic books. I had practically no hair when I was a kid!


I have a cheat-sheet for each one of my characters about their personality, the way they look, etc. So there is no possible way that I could have writer's block.


Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.


I feel happy to terrify kids.


I guess I'm way too kind and generous, and a saint - if you can believe that!


Making my class laugh and getting in trouble. I was the class clown. [sic]





Robert Lawrence Stine, you are truly an inspiration.


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