Canon Fodder is now available — Dear Medium readers, I’d like to announce that my new poetry collection, Canon Fodder: Poems Inspired by Classic Literature, is now available for purchase on Amazon in hardcover and paperback. To say I am proud of this work would be a grievous understatement. These poems, and one piece of short…

It did not meet Distribution Standards — Yesterday Medium finally announced the winners of their crazy contest, The Medium Writer’s Challenge. Let’s be honest, the whole circus was a shit show. It was poorly organized, they pushed back deadlines on judging, no one knew what was going on with it behind the scenes, how it was being…

And how you can too with your writing — Making money on Medium is easy. It’s so easy in fact, everyone is doing it. How do I know everyone is doing it? Because every time I log into Medium I am told about it by a multitude of articles bragging about how easy it is to do. I’m told…

The writer your mother warned you about — Hello, fellow Medium addicts. My name is Jay Sizemore. You may recognize me from such films as “The Poet With Borderline Personality Disorder” or “How to Alienate an Entire Genre of Writers in Five Easy Moves.” I actually have an undiagnosed case of mild Tourette’s Syndrome, which I believe was…

Poem for Salman Rushdie — Freedom of Speech ~for Salman Rushdie In a dream I had, the apostates gathered to breathe shared sighs of relief, and laughter, amid the shock of disbelief, that somehow they’d survived long enough to see a world achieve peace. All it took was one more violent act, just one more author…

A poem about poetry’s demise — Death Rattle The poets seem stuck in the posture of a shrug as the coroners huddle nearby shuffling papers, smoking, the cuffs of their white jackets stained dark with blood of this great prolonged autopsy. They’ve again declared that Poetry is dead. Its corpse lays splayed on a stainless steel table, stanzas…

A poem about love — The hardness of the world I want my dog to live forever. The way my stomach tangles in knots at the mere thought of his loss, speaks to the depths of my love. He’s so dumb and clueless about how much he means to me, like, he doesn’t even try to…

A poem — Some thoughts on Abortion I saw a monarch butterfly inexplicably afloat, and lost amid the alien landscape of a Walmart store, its startling beauty like a manifestation of panic found in an orange and black blur, paper-thin wings careening it through the aisles of Maxi-Pad boxes, displays of boner pills, stacks of…