Natives

My street is home to everything
from a dog
hotel to a train station to a rowing club
to a care home for old East
Berlin drunks.

The care home is a Stalinist
high-rise, typical for East Berlin,
and the drunks who pour
out of it everyday
take to the street with their wheelchairs
and pushcarts, with their chiming
beer bottles, their groans
of flatulence, their clouds of cheap
tobacco smoke.

They look like the zombie apocalypse
coming down the road,
whole hordes of them sometimes
plowing their way past joggers,
children, people on their way to work.

These old drunks
are on their way to the liquor store at the end of the street,
and despite their busted hips,
their slack jaws,
their gone bladders,
their atrophied legs,
despite those clumsy old contraptions bridling them,
they will make it there
alright.
They’ve always made it there.

Even an apocalypse
couldn’t hold them back.

The Island of the Fire Giants

I’ve died here too
many times
not to belong here
I am the winds
the wandering sea
light those ugly
palm trees that stupid executive
golf course the whisky
sour mornings this place
established me
this place of recovering
assholes and mad iguana
sunsets I have died here too
many times on the highways
in the watering holes in little
storefronts on the beaches
with lawn equipment
I am everything
here from the salt in the water
to a faceless nobody
to the man in the sandwich
board advertising jesus
on one side and discounted
hunting apparel
on the other somehow
this is all a part
of me this place this place
can’t kill me I have
died here already too many
times I am established
here among
the dead

Rejection Letter

Dear Writer,
Thank you for submitting to us.
Unfortunately,
the editors have decided you
just don’t fit
into our inclusive group.
We don’t like your
face, you have no MFA
degree, you are not actively involved
in any of the latest popular causes,
your follower count blows
dead bears, you rarely use memes,
your poetry speaks of nothing
that resonates with any
of us. In a word, we reject you.
But hey, ours is a small staff
comprising of only the most
opportunistic
pantywaists in the Twitter
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