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Real Bananas and MoonPie

I am drawn to the holy, the scientific, and the wildly grotesque landscapes of the American psyche, and I am most interested in where these three converge. So naturally I write everything down in iPhone notes. I like to keep a list buried there of random facts I’ve heard. Sometimes I prefer if they’re untrue.

My favorite is when my partner said, “Did you know, the closest thing to the taste of real banana these days is MoonPie?” I refuse to fact-check that statement. I believe it.

A lot of my poems come from the voices I hold close to me in everyday life.

The poem “End Times” is largely an attempt at conversation with my mother, a devout Christian. I am not religious, but I am interested in the idea of prayer and how it has changed over time. If prayer is a call for help, based on the faith of being answered, how is that ritual complicated by something like telephones or the Golden Record or an SOS? I am as interested in the methods by which people pray as I am by the situation that can drive a person to staple “Lost Dog” to a telephone pole, and how this, too, is a prayer.

For me, poetry ultimately exists between what science cannot reconcile and what religion often refuses to look toward.