--YOU SHOULD COME INSIDE


…I’m writing this late at night.
I could tell you a lot of things right now, but it’d be like drunk dialing.
Some might shock you.
Some could even offend.
Alas, I think I’ll demure.

…I once saw a photo of a Facebook “friend” (I honestly don’t really know her, although she seems very nice) who’d gotten some terrific tattoos, and of course, that just happened triggered me writing, and I happened to see a new online lit magazine that wanted writing having to do with Alamaba, or birthed in that Southern spirit, and so I wrote a few pieces about these pictures, several of which were published in Steel Toe Review and one which was anthologized.

This was it:


Ways to Remember Birmingham

She gives her pets
street names—
Hunter and Red Mountain,
Oak, Valley, Tuscaloosa.
The gold fish are 1st through 9th Avenue.

She has the city tattooed across her chest so she can see
the campus in the mirror when she’s on top,
but the truth is
it’s been a long time,
and the fish are floating belly up
and the dog has diarrhea
and the embryo inside her has grown bad boy hair by now,
his hands and feet itching
to make their way into the world
with or without you,
you bastard.