The WAsting Season

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The Wasting Season is a completed collection of poems for which I am seeking a publisher.  Many of the poems, including the award winning "Fighting Fermi", have appeared in literary journals both online and in print, including North American Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Good River Review, and many more.

The collection examines the doubts of raising kids in a world fraught with war, climate change, and deep social division and asks how someone can lead their children forward with a clear conscience.     

The title serves multiple meanings:  it represents the speaker's fears that the world is approaching a wasting season - an era of shortage and strife where our lives will be defined by want.  Also, however, it considers that right now, we are in a wasting season - a  period in which we are wasting our chances to set our world on the track it needs to be on.  Finally, it considers the past as a wasting season - a time where we recklessly wasted the resources and opportunities of the world.

I do want hope, belief 

in intercession. That my children,

if in need, could expect bread.

To know them is to know the dirt

engrained lines of their shoeless feet

as they belly sprawl over coloring books.

Just one state over, a blue newborn found

in a blue cooler beneath a speed limit sign.

This, exactly, has happened before: a life 

as iteration of the facets of human cruelty,

what I read the first occurrence only

to me – tragedy sealed in Ziplocs 

and four-wheel drive Suburbans parked

windows up in summer sun.

Blame it on snakes or belts or lineages

of fists, but my children are too real 

to allow anyone such grace.

I watch them totter about in pajamas. 

They bicker about games and turns 

and who looks at whom. Loud with life, 

they dip crackers in milk and brush crumbs 

off their lips with forearms as they dance,

make it hard to understand that as humans,

something monstrous lives in us all.

No parent can be innocent 

and expect to keep their children 

the same while they sing bedtime. 

After mine are tucked in, I lie 

in bed under the fan as the dog 

circles its rug. Tomorrow, again, 

I look for new roads, choose one 

that leads to more than that.

-from The Wasting Season

In one eye, headlines like “Florida Man 

Arrested for Practicing Karate on Swans,” 

and, in the other, an old student 

with whom I haven’t spoken for years 

fears an old, mutual acquaintance

I’d forgotten is a suicide risk.

On the TV, a bad remake of a bad movie.

In the middle, the screen this poem inhabits.

None of them know how often I minimize the others. 

Meanwhile, everywhere someone seems unaware

they’re abusing something. I’m unsure of my crime

but no doubt I must be committing one. 

Everything untainted has been measured into glasses 

and used to play a symphony with silverware. 

There is a video on YouTube. It plays after

central African violence but before 

the information paradox.  Then, three clips 

of cats that failed to become viral. 

It’s okay though. We can help each other remotely 

in ways never before imagined.  White masks 

on elastic bands and non-latex hypoallergenic gloves

become wholly unnecessary once we abstract 

human assistance. After all, binary is of one and not one. 

We don’t even need to make eye contact.

Your hand makes the same motion to enact compassion 

as it does to access click bait and pornography, all 

now expressions of instant gratification to elate 

ourselves. We can console a thousand in spirit 

rather than one we sought out, a relationship

now optional. Take comfort though;

somewhere, there still remains someone without 

a screen to bellow through. They don’t know 

wires or signals or contact. Maybe they live

in a place where dust coats the cookware,

one must hike to wait in a line for water

and you never stop hearing the buzz of insects.

Maybe they brew teas from local flowers, 

spend their evenings mending jackets

with different sized needle between 

humming, pursed lips, and they rock

on a creaking porch envisioning better 

fences and the fortunes they will bring.

I’m letting myself get carried away, I know,

as I pour a coffee, search for clean spoons 

and a conscience just dirty enough to be human.

I can’t say for sure I’ve helped myself lately

or that I’ve lived more than yesterday’s script,

but, right now, the kids and my wife sleep. 

I check on them and their night lights and find that

blankets rise and fall here and anywhere I look 

from the windows. Down at the bottom of the hill 

lived the woman who tried to run her family over

with her SUV over some trivial domestic squabble

before she barricaded the home against the police.  

I thought I saw sugar in the cabinet the other day. 

Now, now I am uncertain, and there is no doubt 

that the glue traps in the basement are full. 

The movie hasn’t stopped.  New headlines are in. 

No one has died nor are they the wiser. Already, 

on the counter, my forgotten drink, somehow, 

                                                                             my thirst too.

-from The Wasting Season