Honestly, I hope that title confuses you as much it does me. Well, as much as it does at certain moments. Because there are moments of clarity. I would want you to be a little confused not because I’m cruel in the things I share, but rather, because of the fact something appears to be working in that confusion. Why the confusion? Well, I’m scattered between projects and teaching and nearly reading whole books.  It’s fruitful, if not disorganized. Yet,  the words and sentences and stories are all moving forward.

So, maybe they are fuel each other.  Yeah, this work on the Circle City Satoris series of poems and this somewhat alarming return to fiction set in Windsor are working with each other in some sense. Maybe it’s that they both feel so different that each feels like an escape from the work of the other. Maybe it’s that the time between when I often want to work on them and when I actually get to them affords that distance. They are both working their ways out and both doing so in their time.  But it’s good to say that they are on their way.

The poems are exploration of our time in Indiana. There has always been something ethereal and timelessly American in that state. Maybe it was the way the air was always heavy with the humid stuff that makes up life itself or maybe it was the place where I more or less grew into whatever semblance my life has taken of adulthood.  To me, they feel like bluegrass and hot summer sunlight through a glass of ice tea. I’m still rooting around in there and still figuring out a lot of what these pieces are supposed to be. But it’s pleasant.

And the fiction, well, that’s a different thing altogether. Because they are fundamental stories and not glimmers, well they find roots in the land around them. But they flower in ways that my poems don’t generally have time to. They breathe the air I breathe and find their details in the world around me.  They are spaces inhabited by events and people, basically a deeper kind of place to live. So the fiction sprouts its scenes around Windsor because it is the place that I find myself in both thought and action. Although, I worry that my mind is warped as I’ve managed to bring in an underground MMA fight around the newest piece that talks about breaking cultural and social lines. Again, the piece is too long. Again, I likely won’t be able to cut it down much. Damn it for being long winded and detail driven in fiction.

For those that are interested, I will be having three new poems coming this year: “Mason 20”  in Reed Magazine,  “Bhavacakra at the Gates of Deer Creek” in Straylight Literary Magazine, and “Lightning Hopkins Emerges from the Woods at Mooresville, IN” in the Rag.  Not really new news, but just a quick bit to say that this jumbled mess of work I’ve been plodding through leads somewhere.  Or it has in the past.  History does have a way of repeating itself.