The stars have no proof / of life but smolder regardless, maggots / feasting on the sky’s vast corpse, and like them / you were science before you were fiction.

“Aaron met him in New Jersey, coming back from his twice-annual visit to his sister’s in Cherry Hill, and within twenty minutes he’d asked Max to come home—to live.”

the dog was lucky enough to catch
it mid-air, the bird flying low
searching for worms

or seed. The burial
is quick, without
ceremony. Some preservation…

“A couple of years ago, you invited me to edit one of your issues, and that was a very different experience. For the first time I was not the one asking to be published….I took the job very seriously. I wanted to do for writers what other writers and editors had done for me.”

“I think what's important is to look at your own obsessions, whether it's a family tale that you remember and wonder about, like some missing great grandmother whom you’ve heard stories about, or maybe something happened in your town years ago, and you thought, well, that's a weird story.”

I was a bartender for the last five years. People tend to think that’s pretty interesting, but after a while it just gets depressing.

While the story isn’t autobiographical, it is set in the landscape of my childhood. The summers were humid, gluey and close. Most everywhere was without central air conditioning.

After reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History my last year of high school, I wanted to run off to Vermont to befriend a clique of elitist classics students and participate in modern-day Bacchic rites.

My first publication was a short story about a professional suicide note writer entitled “Assisted Living” published in Umbrella Factory, September 2013.