Alex Pickens

cackling grasshoppers slide / down veils of heat on pocketknife wings
the mind’s rhythm slows, a terrapin / shoeless on shiftless winds
white pine wastelands, where truckers / on lost frequencies follow
sunrises melting into sunsets / in cypress swamps deliquescing, sinking
out to sea, until the only way home / is to backtrack.

Alex Pickens’ work has recently been accepted by The Inkwell Journal, Maudlin House, Pretty Owl Poetry, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Eastern Iowa Review, Gone Lawn, Jersey Devil Press, Crack the Spine, and Moonpark Review, while his flash fiction has been nominated for a Best Microfiction, 2018 anthology. Author of award-winning screenplays, in his spare time he runs in the mountains, reads the Classics, and fingerpicks the blues. He is told that he is a direct descendant of Andrew Pickens, a Revolutionary War general of South Carolina nicknamed “The Wizard Owl.”