toddlers with their faces blurred out or covered by cowboy hat will the mother keep this up until the kid is a man using the initial for his name a short story collection about L. # She’s crushed by the faucet. The charring of the hand. The flooring peeling up after run, run, run, running
when you’re waiting for your check to go through – come on over to my house I have a prayer – I am working with a stutter come over, take an echo bath: share with me come over – make it undone make it lush – make it future make my body a harp you
It’s quiet. The hollow shake of a thermos. Air resting, suspended, lukewarm. My skull is full of mothballs. My limbs, stone. My glands secreting in secret. Whisky dribbling. Sink half full of muck. She’s thinking of me, I can feel it in a pit knotting in my gut. She’s wearing white and she hates it. It’s blotchy with granules of displeasing
Pluming smoke, pupils like myrrh, lavender eyes, sage skin, grenache lips, a tongue of tannin with a gravel finish. The record spins, the needle placed, it’s just now catching. I’m laying on a beige carpet, bonded to it like velcro, staring at the eggshell white, popcorn ceiling. My body’s become a cauldron of amorphous fumes, the future telling me its long withheld secrets,
She came to me in the end of night wearing the stems and leaves of a sword fern, adorned in cockle shells, her hair sprinkling black sands, her eyes like moons, her hands swaying and caressing like the rolling mounds past dry gulch. She came to me after as the birds started singing, when the winds took
The night is dark So dark you could catch the darkness in a bowl or catch water in a bowl at the bottom of an ocean The machine roars, a lonely rumble It cuts through the dark Disturbing the peace Here I am, controlling this metal beast My headlights barely cut through the night This
Life is the river your father drowned in When the tailings dike failed, Or his friend died in the mineshaft, Or some such thing that your mother won’t say. It is lunchtime in the house that smells of cigarettes and mildewed laundry and damp basement, ashes wafting from the polyolefin couch and green sculpted shag
Have you ever forced your own soundtrack over top of the TV news headphones in ears blocking out assault by political commentary making pundits move their lips in sync with the beat their arms waving, their eyes shouting, their mouths, futile. They are tragic figures of speech, Silenced.
“The ferry’s loading right now,” announces my nephew, Lucas, looking down at the time on his phone. He is strapped into the front passenger seat beside me as we hurtle down the narrow, winding highway like the lead cart in a roller coaster. I am driving as fast as I safely can on the curving, rolling road. A few times I cross over the yellow and white lines to cut a corner but only where I can see far enough
She sat on the cool rail, looking out into the woods on the far side of the tracks. Waiting. It was still early enough that a thick fog clung to everything, as it did every morning in the spring. A breeze shifted the air around her, and she could feel the cool dampness against her
Despair and bitter humor in the mountains that civilization forgot; punitive nit-picking by ninnies, and the lesson of being late to the party The forum was a small-town affair yet symbolic of our national humor. It was organized by two women: one with extensive experience, and one who dabbled. One had earnest, concrete ideas, while the
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