Happy to share that my poem "How Can It Be?" has just appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review. Many thanks to editor Wolfgang Görtschacher for including it among so many other fine pieces in Issue 43.
Thanks to editor @jrobertlennon.com and @epochliterary.com for including my odd little piece "Nineteen Footnotes on a Poem About My Marriage" as a featured essay in the Fall 2025 issue. I'm grateful to be part of such an impressive collection. You can find it at www.epochliterary.com/featuredessay
Brain-damaged psychopath methamphetamine addict . . . we're now squarely in the "Tuco Salamanca" era in the history of the republic.
Many thanks to Adam Bechtold and Dylan Hogan at @samfiftyfour.bsky.social for their deep dive into my odd, cross-genre piece "Prayer for a Lost Child (with notes)" on the Jan. 16 edition of Samfiftyfour's "Loose Criteria" podcast. You can find it here: open.spotify.com/episode/0ef1...
Yes. It absolutely feels like watching a plane crash. It feels like "wishing this weren't happening" is the best one can do. But that's actually not true. The feeling that things are sadly inevitable is a kind of toxin secreted on the skin of malignancy to paralyze the impulse to do more than wish.
As individuals, as a culture, as adherents to an idea, we are what we do and create. Full stop. We are not the things we wish for, justify or explain. If you care for someone, you are a caregiver. If you wish someone would somehow be cared for, even if you wish for it with passion, you are nothing.
I'm excited to share that my poem "The Dardanelles: Hero and Leander at 60" has been selected as one of the winners of the Lazuli Literary Group's fall prize. I'm grateful to editor Sakina Fakhri for her support and guidance. You can read the piece here: www.lazuliliterarygroup.com/the-dardanel...
Many thanks to the team at US Catholic magazine and its gifted editor Rebecca Bratten Weiss (@rbratten.bsky.social) for making a home for my poem "Prayer for a Lost Child." It's about a lot of things . . . fathers and daughters, prayers, grave things in the dark and old railroads and railroad men.
In Act III, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Titus has been presented with the monstrous reality of his daughter's assault and mutilation, the decapitated heads of two sons and his own severed hand. From the depth of his horror and grief, he starts to laugh . . .
youtu.be/VMHDO-bmba0?...
Not gonna lie, I'm about 88% Pearl with Jupiter in Torgo.
A picture I took in 2020 of a white toilet discarded on a street corner in a neighborhood. It’s sitting upright on a storm drain. The toilet appears as if waiting for a bus. It’s a very lonely picture.
a few years ago I took this picture of a toilet on the street corner and it’s haunted me ever since
there are poems everywhere for those with eyes to see
The beige with the white seat makes it almost too much to bear.
So beautiful and well made. Beyond.
Feeling grateful for my sister, who for 20 years gathered our complicated clan at her house, until her passing a little over two years ago. She visited us, briefly, a few months later. This one's for her.
Instead of what it actually is . . . a madness intended to exterminate the people and ideas whose existence calls into question assumptions about what it means to be worthy of participation in American life.
The insanity will (probably) dissipate and end. But it's hard to imagine how things will return to being "ok" again . . . except via a countervailing act of erasure that papers over the hate-frenzy we are in the midst of, recasting it as something in the mainstream of human possibility . . .
If you are white and of a certain age or economic or educational lineage, speak to your neighbors. You'll discover how much many of them are rooting for this erasure. You will see the kind of bacchic frenzy they are welcoming into their midst. It's the nature of Americans to do so from time to time.
Our culture has existed for about 250 years and we have had, perhaps, ten of them . . . or thereabouts. They are part of our culture, not an exception to it . . . They are (malignantly) a feature, not a bug. And, if we're honest, they come not from some lunatic ruling class, but from the grassroots.
Let's be honest about what is happening all around us now . . . we are entering one of our culture's frequent periods of violent erasure. Other cultures have these (the Inquisition, Stalinism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Rwandan genocide) but these cultures have one every thousand years.
Thanks to Free State Review and editor Barrett Warner (@riskingmelodrama.bsky.social) for having confidence in this piece.
My long(ish) poem "Night Ride Across the Alleghenies" traces the story of my parents' hasty wedding in Feb. 1963. Along the way, it asks about memory, secrets, vagrancy, the Civil War, surveillance and the "just so stories" we invent to fill in the gaps.
Happy to share that my poem "Repair" has just appeared in the July edition of Plume Poetry. You can find it here (plumepoetry.com/repair/) with a few of my thoughts about it here (plumepoetry.com/poets-and-tr...). Many thanks to Danny Lawless and the entire Plume editorial team.
Very excited to share that my poem "Memento Mori" appeared in Issue 118 of Image Journal. You can find it at imagejournal.org/article/meme... Thanks to the editors who made it happen, especially Shane McCrae and the fantastic Mary Kenagy Mitchell.
My short story, "Two Not Touch," appeared in Volume 22 of Bridge Magazine (www.bridge-chicago.org/bridge-store...). Grateful to fiction editor Meghan Lamb and the Bridge team for including this piece in their very impressive collection.
Many thanks to editor Celeste Schantz and Mason Street Review for including my poem "Bottom." It's about a lot of things . . . love, foolishness, ceramics, Shakespeare, enchantment, gift-giving . . . Find it here: masonstreetreview.org/2022/09/25/b...
Many thanks to M. I. Shokrian and The Thieving Magpie for including three poems of mine in Issue 19. You can find them here: thievingmagpie.org/greg-sendi-3...
Thanks to the team at The Writing Disorder for making a home for my creative nonfiction piece "The Peshaman Fragments." I hope you'll take a look.
writingdisorder.com/greg-sendi-n...
Many thanks to Nikki Boss and Natalie Byers at Skink Beat Review for publishing my piece called “Nineteen Footnotes from a Monograph on Attention Mechanics." You can find it here: www.flipsnack.com/nikkiax/augu...
