August, you fickle b, where did you come from? It seems like only yesterday I was basking in the humid heat of July! (It was only yesterday). I have a few things worth reporting.

I guess before anything else I should let you all know that the special edition of Drunk Monkeys (in response to the Orlando PULSE shooting) is now out. This was such an amazing endeavor and I am so happy to have been a part of it, even from just a social media standpoint. I beg you all to read it. It has some stellar contributors.

My poem “Our Bones Will Be Our Ruins” is featured in Clever Girl issue 4.  You can buy it via their website.

I finished Zoetic Press‘s 31/31 Write Like You’re Alive challenge. Well, I mean, I got like 25 pieces in, but that counts. I hosted 4 live chats on Twitter and I am considering keeping them going. I did a series of erasure poems based on Dax Riggs songs and made them into a short chapbook. If you’d want one, order one here!

In July, Pokemon Go debuted. I am going through a hard time emotionally– probably the hardest of my life, a time where old hopes are dying and new hopes are clawing desperately at the dirt covering them, trying to emerge. Pokemon Go lifts that depression and those suicidal thoughts, albeit temporarily, and my Facebook rant about those bashing it was crafted into a more viable essay that Five 2 One Magazine was kind enough to publish. Weeks later, I still love it, regardless of what the whiny babies at r/pokemongo have to say. I even got my first piece of hate mail, from a man in my city who told me to start renting here (?) and go home by 10, and when I replied to him he told me if I replied back it would be considered harassment! People are sort of crazy.

Yesterday my friend Dan and I took my son Aidan on a 5 mile scavenger hunt in Salem MA, and we caught tons of Pokemon, so shut up, ~haters~.

I think that might be it for now. It’s back to being distracted and submitting poems to different places for now.