4/29/2026 (Burning the Prairie, Mark Cohen Book, Etc.)

I have poetry forthcoming in ANMLY. I'll let you know when the fall issue is out.

I also have another arts-related project that I'm going to share at some point. I'm not sure when. I can be secretive about things for no reason.

Here are a couple of photos from the end of March/early April. The photos are blurry and grainy with weird shadows, but I didn't look at the photos until later. My phone was taking slightly blurry photos for months. (Also, the poetry diffuser smells amazing.) I finally fixed it by moving about six hundred photos to online storage and updating my phone.

 

Blurry, but still proof of survival in 2026. Speaking of photos, this is so true. 

About two and a half weeks ago, I went to my parents' farm and helped them burn the prairie. It was my first time helping them with it. Other times they burned the prairie, I lived in other states. There may have been one time since being back in the state that they burned. I think that was the time my brother helped them. My job was mostly standing around and watching certain areas. I did put out some small flames with the back of a shovel, and I was even wearing bib coveralls, so I looked very official. Prairie burning is to benefit the land (conservation), but the visuals of the flames and smoke that afternoon and evening felt symbolic of the United States in its current state of crisis. Here are some photos.

Mark Cohen: Trespass, a book of Mark Cohen's photography with writing by Phillip Prodger, is a book I've been returning to many times over the last seven months.

The photos I feel most drawn to in the book change every time I go through it. Here is what I was most drawn to from the book last week.

Something I've been using lately is this EVOO Skin hand sanitizer lotion from PlaneAire. It's a lot more pleasant to use than the hand sanitizers I was using during the pandemic. It feels and smells more like lotion than hand sanitizer. As an immunocompromised person, I feel that using hand sanitizer helps me get sick less often, but a lot of hand sanitizers physically repulse me now after the stress of the pandemic. This one is nice because it kills germs without provoking feelings of impending doom.

#giftedproducts