Paul Aaron Domenick

Author of The Peculiarlirities of Red Chairs:A Decade of Healing My Trauma with Poetry and Photography

Welcome to my website! I am a former high school teacher who took up photography and poetry a decade ago to treat my trauma and addiction, even though I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD in 2024, and my photography and poetry writing intensified while I was getting treatment. Trauma and addiction can be transformed and trasmuted by engaging in art. It works on multiple levels, including non-verbal expression and processing; satefy and control; integration and meaning-making; emotional regulation; community and connection; and neuroplasticity and healing. I present here a myriad of photos and poems that have directly related to my healing experiences. You will find more images and content in my book. Thank you again for visiting. My only hope is that you are inspired.



Artistic expression for transformation

Healing Trauma with Photography and Poetry

Healing journey through art and words
View My Book

Gallery of Works

Poetry Collection

Miguel, Who Else is Like God?
My Trauma
Colors She Can Eat with Her Eyes
Who Else is Like God, Miguel? Oh, Miguel, with your cat-milk eyes. Tell me again how the road winds to your reserved place in heaven and how your abuela gave you a new name. How the belly of the sugary sky gave you feathered-serpent legs and chafed hands that paint spinytail landscapes and rows of allspice. Can I rub your chestnut cheekbones, and trace the pillowy partings of your hair, and dip my tongue in your holy watering mouth that forms U’s at the end of my name? Then tell me again how you used sorcery in silos of magical corn that smokes like you do on the poet’s stage. Will you clayskull Spires in my dreams? If so, I will drink your chocolatey sweat and wonder how your body is a guitar string, how your fists in our Revolutions still burn. Tell me, Miguel, who else is like God?
Is it being over the line to want a sufficient taste of the other side of fun-house mirrors where survival was possible in plans for blank posterity, or in the salt bath of eyes that soaked up and then spewed my feathered soul, which lay dormant in secret alleys paved with chicken shit? And could it be that I misunderstood well-wishers with open containers, inviting me to fill with echoes and sperm and diary entries that unite both sides of love-lost levees vulnerable to reawakening star lilies that grow in basements and half-written poems? Because it was only half-eaten apples that rotted and suggested make believe with the sordid suffer machines that power, say, the bodies of Christ and Sisyphus and bombs placed in my off-targeted cranial vagus that wastes away futile time after a newborn killing. Then there are reconciliations found in city traffic, a wrist on a frozen pole, or the slight smell of lavender. But what happens when it’s not even enough to suffer, while God learns how to die? No. I would rather hope the belly of muster-seed emotions, which vines from my bowels, are tamed by the crafted cross of a star-crossed family that un-conditions the Zephyrs of yesterday’s penances.
She said she liked leg warmers and stained-glass Jesuses shaman drums and Miss America swimsuits fly eyes and Kufi caps Queen jubilees and taco trucks She thought private parts should be covered with star stickers and Mona Lisa looked like formaldehyde my army men ought to carry around lightsabers and sharks dreamed of coral reefs She said that only African women know how to dress right and on the top of Mount Everest you can go blind the Pharaohs of Egypt could kiss her all day except Ramses XI because he probably looked like sand One day I asked her if she would ever want to fly to the moon she said only the Milky Way that we should make Sundays with cotton candy ice cream and later put marbles in the bottom of her goldfish tank I said to her that I finally understood what she meant and that I thought girls were just plain silly but she just put her palm up to my loopy lips and grabbed her kaleidoscope to clock me in the head
Sodomy, Screwing him with the Word In the beginning, his name was Nameless. In the end, his name was Adam. All that was left was the void of the Middle. So, fruit me your rib, seed inside my slits, jaw my rattling body. My lily’s turret is all yours, Darling. “Yeah, no.” The later interpreters pissed in front of Lot’s windows, The disguised names came to them Unknown. Sodom then couldn’t unload in the Middle. Out them blind out, hole them cross whole, down them hold hard! Run! I am your pillar of salacious salt, Sweetheart. “Yeah, whatever.” They made the lay-next-to-him side wrong. Sweats of olfactory musk remain. We’ve left whole-nesses in the Middle. Sun our new son, guilt your God’s sake, stone my cherry pick. Oh, I’d be so turned on, Dearest. “Yeah, okay.” Intractable bits that have no Middle. Just a far right. Not fractal energy. Just worthlessness. “Yeah…”
Ephemeral Velocity It’s so damn cold in this self-created vacuum. Might I suggest to myself that time takes ruthless time? I have a secret to share with you: I see nothing instead of something. Yes, no thing for the self-absorption of a man whose boyhood was spent vacuuming unmet needs. By the way, is borderline personality disorder a reason for not even connecting with animals? I’ve never been diagnosed but who really knows? I’ve been contemplating wings lately — angels and birds. I dislike birds. Dissatisfaction with god’s satisfaction mirrors me in shards. But could you stay with me awhile? I’ll prove I can connect. In the afterglow of sadness, She said every thing is no thing. And so begins another goddamn epilogue.
I Love You, David Christopher After the gay wedding, we went to nightclub. It was named after Proteus. Such myth we can’t control. I was drowning, chasing some guy’s tail; an English teacher who ignored me. Unbuckling, I sank back into orbit, sitting down and facing a man across from me. His shy and forever smile marked a path on which all is sudden gold and time-shifting. The greenness of his eyes in the strobing light pulsed with rhythmic sound in a chance to color the drunk earth below us. A clasp held me to this new, sweet orchestra. And who can remember what we spoke? It was just a clean and shiny noise and the pulls of violin strings that harmonized with baroque recognitions. The song Ray of Light by Madonna lifted us Home to dance like peacock spiders. We sat again. It’s not even kismet at this point, exchanging harps that could only strum, and if there is anything written, it can only point to these unmapped places in a kind of paradise. But I couldn’t place it. There was something about his diaphanous heart that made mine rise a millimeter a second, by the force of grace and baptism, directing us to the exits of neon promise and calling each other by our Names. No memory existed or time-stamped our drive Home. So, who knew it may have told the foreseeable—that it would contain 23 years— together, tethered, in a dance of unceasing Spirit.
Same-Song Edens He speaks through his groin in the pale morning for the sake of leaving sparkling sperm on his man’s feet in the spartan room made for gods and Machiavellian authors who speak of maidens castrating operatic figures so supple and clean and ready for their worlds to end. And how does he destroy newspapers depicting courts circus-ing boy-parts in the name of Jesus. She hovers over the whigs to save the fairies dripping with the shame of redwood proportion to bury him, he, they. Maybe when the cosmos made touching of the same male versus, their bodies kept entanglement promises for mirrors, and concluded that sameness would make the archaic stars so entrenched in approval of Creators that disapproval cut angels. So, forget his tattooed likenesses and forgeries because you have made him with your primal mixing of the embryos pulsing in your cult families and cell pools that protect your offspring from digging through the ocean’s bottom and ending your forsaken world.
Our Queer Kids Between locker-slammed prophecies and cafeteria psalms, they provide combinations to ultraviolet fun-houses — Quantum superpositions of mascara and masks, dancing through the liminal, on parade. No more pejorative fairies in chrysalis cocoons, who split our tongues on “oh-be-a-fine-girl” stars, swallowing silver spoons of mercurial weight; they’re as ancient as the hills, yet fresh as morning glories breaking through our windowsills. Their bodies: sacred temples with washable-painted owned slurs; they transform into prisms, catching light stars on the edge of our existential DNA, rain-coiled in catch-22 tubes and our plebeian, useless paperweights. In gymnasium diaspora, forbidden bathrooms scatter among our boomer kin; they flush through coruscate-coded signals flashing in our skies. Each closet a universe, each squeal holds a sword — They’re writing new mythologies, no archangels came to proclaim. Watch them shed their exoskeletons of shame, each deadname new bark etched in triangle-tattoos, like bioluminescent inks beneath their party lines. Let them call us mother constellation; let them call us strange; they’re hard-boned in sneakers, orchestrating orchid metamorphoses. Each of their heartbeats is a revolution; each of their breaths, a warfare won, as we paint ourselves in colors stolen from Native binaries, in trees, bearing more strange fruit. They sneak out of our suburban homes, paved with stones thrown by lottery straights, and no simple categorizations can be made anymore — so summon the supremest of courts; unshave heads and necks and hypotheses, for looming into beings we never thought to name, they keep our dolls safe by unlocking doors — and they are coming to wash our feet in glitter. The gods are very pleased. So let us call upon our inner beasts and not tame Pegasus wings. Obey our queer kids, and find ourselves Here.
The Snow Globe A boy puts a quarter in a toy machine. A toy car is dispensed in a plastic dome —  perfect for making a snow globe. Tiny square cutouts of foil becomes glittering snow that falls on a toy soldier he puts inside. And when it’s filled with water and shaken, the soldier seems so alone. But possibilities run out of words, and all he can think about is what his favorite aunt will think of this homemade gift. His father walks into his bedroom and tells the boy he’s sad. So, the boy gives the snow globe to him instead. His father shakes it and has the idea to take him sledding.
Inside the globe, the snow is settled, until it is shaken up again for new imaginations to prevail and for loneliness to speak out again.

What People Say

I have seen Paul Domenick's collection many times, and I have to tell you I just love that he's publishing a book. His photography and poetry are so unique--his photos should be in a gallery. The colors he uses are so vibrant and tranquil, and his black and whites show a great amount of control. Paul is a very creative artist, and I will follow him to see what more he's doing.
We both met Paul in high school, and we both knew then his intense creativity would land him square in the rhelm of the arts; he has not let anything get in the way of his creative journey. The photos in this book are so eclectic and unique, and his poetry is insatiable--so well crafted for the modern reader. Although the high quality of his photos and poetry are part of the narrative of this book, his inspirtational story is what sticks out the most.
I met Paul Domenick when he joined ArtsUnited in Broward County. I was president of the organization. Paul's photography immediately stood out from the others. While there are lots of photographers, few do it as an art form like Paul. I tend to focus on the small items that people miss in their daily tives. Old chipping paint, stark shadows. I think Paul and I look at the world around us in similar ways. I knew Paul struggled with depression and addiction, but I didn't realize the effort he was making artistically to overcome it. I can't wait to read the book.
Jennifer Lindquist
Carrie Gomez and Thuy Vu
Peter Meyerhoefer
"For over a decade, Paul Aaron Domenick turned his pain into art—transforming grief, shame, and silence into vivid images and raw, powerful poems. This is more than a book. It’s a journey through the lens of survival, self-expression, and sacred stillness."
Read the following article about Gabor Maté and his incredible work on addiction/trauma and how to heal it.

Inquiry Form

Contact Me

Photographs are available for purchase, but more important is your simple visit to my website. Just type your inquiry into the form on the left. You may send me a message about anything that sparks your interest or curiosity. I'd be more than thrilled just to hear from you!
Or you can contact me via email: domenickphotography@icloud.com More of my photography can be found on my Flickr photostream More of my poetry, flash fiction, and articles can be found on Medium.com