squash sock ankle boot bottomland
ill green spindle and straw spears
bur calf denim pantlegs
American bittern takes a stealth
toward the Western chorus
Originally published by Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem.
Photo credit: Robert So.
Category: Toward: A Memoir
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At the Confluence
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Did I Ever Tell You about the Last Time I Saw Him
Photo credit: cottonbro studio.
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Consecutive December Sixteenths
Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.
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When I Have My Own Place
it will be so quiet
I will be able
to hear three sunflowersin a straight glass vase
on my dining room table
picked up bare and paintedblue and sanded and ash
stained or callalilies, which they pull
like weeds, I hear
in Australia
Originally published by ONE ART.Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2025.
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An Evening Beyond Baroque Poetry Reading Intermission
Photo credit: MART PRODUCTION.
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The First 48
Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2025.
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Of the Life You Could Have
Photo credit: Tirachard Kumtanom.
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End with Past Tense
Last time I saw Goldman, we eatingsammin’ sammiches on Venice
Boulevard, as we do regular
he was talking about how hot it was
that I was a dock worker
when I described what I do, building walls
out of cardboard boxes in semi-trailers. Said he used to
work at the dock in his youth in NYC.
“But not what you do,” he said, “I know what you do.
You couldn’t fit an envelope in there,
they would say of those walls,
when men built them,
men who knew what they were doing,” he said and I said,
“Yes. That’s me.”
Recently, on top of a ladder jamming a particularly difficult
squishy into a tight spot over my head, I thought of one night
on the phone listening to you list again all of the reasons
you could not be with me long-haul.
You cuss like a dock worker.
Not so much anymore, now that I work ship dock
and eat sammin’ sammiches on Venice
or piled high with shrimp ones
on Abbot Kinney with mango
relish
and am so much happier
since I don’t have to struggle
with those supposedly more fitting similars you preferred.
Originally published by Storm Cellar.Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2024.
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Don’t Try That Tusk of Narwhal on Me
I know that’s just an overgrownwhale canine
not a unicorn horn
not a hiking buddy
whose sweat I cannot resist the smell of
backcountry man who knows what is required
and how to carry, bone
and tall and understands
that we is the only status that matters
to spoon my cooking in, to spoon his in me
finds that just so
acoustic trio scheduled to play an afternoon
neighborhood bar in L.A., wakes me
with a throaty
come share Greek pizza on the boardwalk with me
whom I never cease to stagger,
simpatico,
evolving as I wait patiently and patiently
waiting for me while we climb into higher
and higher
vibration
under pine trees
whose protection leaves me
in the enchantment
of willing submission
my best friend, my favorite person
who thinks.
the same.
of me.
one day, could,
from behind a boulder
in the Angeles Forest
milk-white flecked flamingo
diamond and lime
with an aura you can just feel is silver
– – I been on enough dusty bay horsesonce a slick gunmetal dun with striped legs
even a green broke red roan Egyptian stallion
with a no-shit strawberry blonde spiraled mane
so what over it
conjure me up some for-real
bliss-on-tap, stuff-of-myth magic, but please,
don’t swing a twisted fang dripping seaweed
and tell me
it’s a legend
Originally published by Misfit Magazine.Photo credit: Brett Sayles.
The Life You Could Have: a memoir 