Koss Works
Writing | Poetry | Art
Pleasantly surprised to find my poem, “My Therapist Sez” was featured on Diode Poetry’s main page (along with an excerpt. It may disappear by the time you find this, so here’s the link to the entire poem. Patty Paine has been good to me and Diode is publishing some really great work in the journal (and in books and chapbooks).
Update: this poem won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Award. Read about the contest on Winning Writer’s site. Listen to the poem on my audio page.
I published a Kafkaesque poem about the trauma of birth in Mom Egg Review #19. If you dig cockroaches and queer cowgirls, this is for you. Can’t share the whole poem yet but I might record it. You can buy the issue from the address shown in the graphic. Too busy to make my own poem album cover, but here is the Mom Egg Review one below. First, an excerpt:
“and you’re left alone in your existential freedom,
so mount Kafka’s cockroach, Gregor, and gallop happy,
butt-slung in black cowhide chaps, yee-hawing queerity
across the embarrassing town you were born in (Howell).”
Bye for now.
Update: Lumiere Review disappeared themselves and their magazine in 2024 after holding a call for a new issue earlier in the year. Note their GoFundMe is still active. At the time of this writing, they have offered no explanation to the community and their editor refused to answer queries. This was very sad, as it was a promising ‘zine that myself and many others supported. It’s also sad when your important grief work is discarded so callously. I am not the only writer who was publishing about suicide and other difficult topics. I will be writing more about writing, publishing, and grief in the near future and updating this page. Alternate Thanksgiving was published in December (uncannily) in Chiron’s ’24 winter issue. Lumiere Review is now some kind of girly game/gambling site, so if you also published there, I recommend removing your links so they don’t redirect to the site. Also, dead links hurt your Google ranking (that was how I discovered this–analytics)!
Pleased to have two pieces from One for Sorrow published in The Lumiere Review today. “Alternate Thanksgiving” is the first piece in the book. “Twelve Past Dead” appears in a different form (two consecutive poems) in the book. Know that each contains references to grief and/or suicide. There are other poems in the issue that do as well. Note the content warnings in headers, a great idea that I’d like to see other journals implement.
*Links removed because Lumiere Review is now some kind of girly game site. However, you can find “Alternate Thanksgiving” here or in the winter ’24 issue of Chiron. I also have an indigenous Thanksgiving piece published in this issue called “Giving Thanks.”
Pleased to have a poem released on a strange and difficult day of beginnings and endings. This piece is ritualistic and I started it in a CA Conrad workshop, then “workshopped” it in Lynn Melnick’s 92Y workshop last fall/winter. It incorporates bits of the ritual into it. Does that make it meta-ritualistic? I don’t know, but the timing of events reinforces my feelings of a strange order in the cosmos even when it is not what I would like it to be. “Still Life with Cherry Tomatoes No. 1, Singing Bowl,” a poem about endings and renewal. May the doors open somewhere . . . and life and all its struggles obtain meaning through story (Akasha) and metaphor. All of it. The beautiful, the heartbreaking, and the opaque, mysterious, and labile.
Screwing around tonight with some paint and pens, which I then digitized. These are possible inclusions in the book–Magpies of sorts with asemic writing, Wuthering Heights page, and a mysterious black package . . . I like digitizing the work and replicating, changing, introducing new variables . . . Yes, I’m still a bit of a punk. Update: It’s 2024 and I created a new Insta account just for visual poetry, collage, asemic art, and similar. Follow me here. Note this is different from my main Insta account. I will be adding an asemic art gallery some time this summer, but another place to find my work is at Diode Poetry. They published several suites of asemic and erasure poetry. The crow on the right below appeared in different forms on Up the Staircase Quarterly and in a recent issue of Mom Egg Review (print), spring 2024.
