It was those tough Italian kids with the pretty names--DiOrio, DelVecchio, Policarpio--who taught me to love poetry. If I told any one of them he had a pretty anything, I’d get a metaphor for my trouble: a knuckle sandwich; a brand new asshole; my ass kicked into next week.

Poetry is trash, the discarded bits and pieces of what once was…those faded memories you remember each time you see a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or an empty tube of cherry lip gloss or that goofy AF condom package that make you cringe (why?).

Garbage is a portal for poetic exploration.

Gregory Gonzalez writes: “Weighing a word is the most important and most difficult function for a writer. Even more so for a poet. Meter dictates rhyme, and reason, while free verse holds a certain flow; an essence from the soul of the author, put in the narration like living magic into a world once believed to have none.”

Poetry is trash, the discarded bits and pieces of what once was…those faded memories you remember each time you see a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or an empty tube of cherry lip gloss or that goofy AF condom package that make you cringe (why?).

Garbage is a portal for poetic exploration.

Folk poetry has always belonged to the people—a collective voice rising from the fields, the taverns, the streets. It was never intended for the page, nor for academia. It grew from a need to speak when no one was listening, to tell stories about yearning, about suffering, about those small moments of joy that flutter briefly amidst the enduring ache of survival.