Skip to main content

Daniel Crocker


Mercury Must Be In Retrograde or Some Bullshit

You go to the reading and then to a nice
dinner with friends. You started drinking
early and on the drive from St. Louis to Cape
you puke all over yourself
Fajita Nachos
It's your medication making you sick again
You know you shouldn't drink on it
But sometimes you want to have a nice
dinner with friends. There might be something
more to it

You slap yourself. Then you slap
yourself again harder. You tell
your wife this is no way to live
You tell your wife that you want to kill
yourself. You puke again

It's okay, she says, it's okay

You've been so nervous for so many weeks now
that there's not enough klonopin left to do the job
even if you really wanted to. And you did

didn't you? For a moment
you thought about it and rode the rest
of the way home with puke drying on
your best pants and a wife who says
it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay
like a prayer. 





My Penis

I've never been happy with it
not being as big as I'd hoped

This kid at church camp
asked me if there was something
wrong with it

hidden up under its shell

It got better, I guess, as I got older
but never quite to what I wanted it to be
which was something worth writing home about

Now, it doesn't work
bipolar meds and whatnot

I still don't like the way people use
the size as an insult

Usually it's men, sometimes women
Often it's in a meme
Often it's directed at Trump and his imagined
small penis

People with small penises are rushing out
in droves to buy big trucks and corvettes
The little weens are stockpiling guns
The pencil dicks are shooting up schools
We're all just compensating

Like that's what makes Trump bad
Like that's what makes is all bad

Almost like it all boils down to a dick.

Daniel Crocker's work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Hobart, Big Muddy, New World Writing, Stirring, Juked, The Chiron Review, The Mas Tequila Review and over 100 others. His books include Like a Fish (full length) and The One Where I Ruin Your Childhood (e-chap with thousands of downloads) both from Sundress Publications. Green Bean Press published several of his books in the '90s and early 2000s. These include People Everyday and Other Poems, Long Live the 2 of Spades, the novel The Cornstalk Man and the short story collection Do Not Look Directly Into Me. He has also published several chapbooks through various presses. His newest full length collection of poetry, Shit House Rat, was published by Spartan Press in September of 2017. Stubborn Mule Press published Leadwood: New and Selected Poems—1998-2018 in October 2018. He was the first winner of the Gerald Locklin Prize in poetry. He is the editor of The Cape Rock (Southeast Missouri State University) and the co-editor of Trailer Park Quarterly. He's also the host of the podcast, Sanesplaining, about poetry, mental illness and nerd stuff.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

Paul Blackburn and Sexism

How does one respond to sexism in poets whose work seems to be filled with it, like Blackburn? The quick answer most people would give is: ignore it. Yet here I am, reading more and more, and yes, enjoying, the supposedly sexist work of Paul Blackburn and wondering why there isn't much if any criticism of his important work in the late 50s and 60s, when he served as gatekeeper and recorder of many readings which have helped establish the avant-garde presence and reading scene in New York as well as given us great historical insight into the poets associated at that time with the New York scene.  And of course I'm thinking about his poems, which kept him in the middle of things as a talent in his own right. It's not difficult, unfortunately to see why he's not read, and that makes me sad. His poetry is worth more than a few cursory footnotes to the era. I've come to the conclusion now, after dipping into the collected poems at length, but randomly, and reading fo