BIO
Dylan Amaro-McIntyre is a reformed former misanthrope who finds beauty in the details because the big picture terrifies him. He draws words and writes pictures. He also writes poems, sometimes well. A regular performer in the Bay Area, his work can be found in various literary magazines, poetry collections, and on concrete walls up and down the California coast. On Thursday nights, he binge eats peanut butter; he recently discovered Macadamia butter, and it is ruining his life.
One day when I was six, and the screaming was too loud I turned my eyes around. Tunneled through my pupils behind bones that hadn’t yet learned to break. Behind armor that still knew how to be strong. I met a boy there for the first time, someone I thought I recognized, who spoke in a language more patterns than prose. All abstracts and imagery, the language of dreams. He told me he was cold, that the sun didn’t rise where he was from, and that I was the reason. He told me I was selfish, the way I’d steal its light away each morning before it could rise. Told me everybody's scared of the dark, but the sun belongs to no one. That we all have to make do with whatever comes our way. He said he wasn’t happy to meet me. I tried to tell him I was sorry, that I didn’t know where else to go, but my teeth turned brittle, flaked to ash and blew away on empty breaths. I tried to stay, and he showed me what would happen if I did. Showed me steel become shrapnel. Showed me my mother. Showed me bones learning to yield. He’s a man now, and sometimes I still visit, against his wishes, of course. He says it’s time I grow up too. That bones heal better than we do, and we can’t always make whole what we’re not around to see break.