Our second poet on the blog!

Beat Until Smooth

I am in the middle of discussing my recipe

for caramel nut brownies with Janet,

the woman seated next to me on the flight home

when there is a loud popping noise

and the plane starts losing altitude fast.

I can hardly breathe.

I can hardly believe this is happening.

This plane is really going down;

we’re really going to die.

It occurs to me that

when I hugged my wife

goodbye at the airport,

I only kissed her on the cheek,

and not on the lips like I should have.

It also occurs to me

that an airliner’s rapid descent from the sky

goes by way too fast for anyone

to be able to get their prayers organized

in any sort of way that would make sense to God.

So listen, I say to Janet,

we really don’t have a lot of time,

but, as I was saying, you only want to use

the black walnuts from Diamond for this recipe

because the other kinds of walnuts

always seem to come out tasting weird

when you take them out of the oven!

Bio:

A past member of five national poetry slam teams (Worcester, Mass. (x2), Washington, D.C., Wilmington, Del. and Albuquerque, N.M.), Rich has published four chapbooks of poetry and for seven years hosted an open reading and slam in Newark, Delaware. Since moving to Albuquerque in March of 2008, Rich has been performing and writing steadily in the Duke City, and is a regular contributor/editor at localpoetsguild.wordpress.com. He is also an educator, adventurer and desert compound prophet. Rich’s poems have appeared in Adobe Walls: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry, Fickle Muses, The Rag, Menagerie, Clutching at Straws, Shot Glass Journal, Mutant Root, The Mas Tequila Review, and The Legendary.