Six More Years Without Chapstick

In my last poetry collection I discussed why I loved expressing myself through poetry. To sum up I broke my hand in a mosh pit and wanted to fight back against the grunge movement for the pain they caused me. I harangued the crowds in ice cream shops and open mics throughout Iowa City to also assuage my guilt in a handmade little book where I hid out in the tightly wound words that was an anodyne for my desires and heated angst.

A friend of mine from around this time helped me make a zine that we distributed to record stores and gave away free to show just how awesome we were at doing creative things. She is the inspiration for this fresh collection of poems having saved our zines in a box in her house since 1996.

We’d print these zines out on a dot matrix printer and illustrate them with hastily Xeroxed images we’d sketched in our notebooks. 

Layout was done on copy machines that smelled of pungent toxic ink and a little light bar would pass along an actual piece of paper that would heat up subtly before we’d staple them together.

These poems made sense to someone and I love my old friend so here they are.