Cats
I started feeding the stray cats when I moved in with him. To attract company, I began leaving food and water by the front door. Fuck Off was the first cat to frequent our patio...
Prose
Behind the Music: Marcus Blanda
As a punk band from Tampa
we were treated like kicked sand—
a nuisance and a bother
to be brushed aside
or shoved off the stage as fodder
for mosh pit marauders
and their skinhead soldiers
down front—that shit happened, no lie.
Heisenberg’s Light
On the morning of the Inevitable Event, one hundred and eighty adolescents––the early comers, twitching like feral cats at the long mica tables of the cafeteria, heads bowed to handhelds––stiffened in synchrony, reflexively, like an orchestra tensing to the lift of a conductor's baton.
An Excerpt from The Talented Ribkins
He only came back because Melvin said he would kill him if he didn’t pay off his debt by the end of the week. It was why he left St. Augustine, why he had no choice but to drive down to Lehigh Acres and dig up the box of money he’d buried in his brother’s yard fourteen years before.
Deland Fall Festival of the Arts
Rockabilly music twanged in the humid air of downtown Deland - the Deland Fall Festival of the Arts was in full swing.
Memories of the Road: Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Late evening in College Park, outside Downtown Orlando, sixty years after Jack Kerouac’s generation-defining opus On the Road reached critical acclaim, cicadas trilled in ancient trees teased by winds from Hurricane Irma...
Some Thoughts on Florida literature
At best this narrative elevates the state to the level of mythology (a pattern of bungling Florida men become Florida Man). At worst Florida is no more than the butt of a joke...
Czar Thumbsky
A troupe of Russian dwarves retired from the circus to found a community built to their scale in South Florida. They purchased land off the Tamiami Trail bordering an endless plain of flooded sawgrass and called it Sweetwater, a mistranslation of the Seminole name for the same swamp.
An Excerpt from The Way of Florida
The sharp oyster beds cut into the feet and to move in the water is a slowness. There is a quiet around you there. The sun is almost welcome. Is almost a wanted sun up above the window of the sea you wade through the bending sights below all bended and rippled you pass a hand through that waterpane and see your arm take an angle to the oyster there...
Out Out
I was desperate for a CVS, but instead found one of those birds—long neck bent like a spring, beak like a spear, caw like a motor that won’t turn over—wading in somebody’s blue blow-up pool.