You thought someone was living inside the walls, laughing at you. Staring at you. Talking about you. You tore at your face until craters bled. Kept telling me something was hiding underneath your skin, crawling with fleas. When I woke up, found your side of the bed empty/cold, I thought I would discover your body … Continue reading Alex, The Addict
Puddles reflect the sun’s glare, the rising chorus of songbirds emerge into a morning in which pine boughs and maple branches hang free without the weight of snow. Along the path: a child’s mitten, the cellophane of a cigarette pack, an empty pint of cheap whiskey, a plastic grocery sack that rolled like tumbleweed during … Continue reading After The Snowmelt
A place pressed anonymously in a small gilt frame — an un-housed painting, like the artist’s still brush, or the stark canvas, too naked, too white. The hand’s left grasping for leaves from last year’s garden — where faint ideas, and the pause between gestures, remain like a van Gogh still-life. The storybook window is … Continue reading Painting Abstractions
Like a 10-year-old with illegal fireworks, I got the Dr Freud app. Now, I’m lying on my living room couch, while the dogs hang around, wagging. Of course, the past isn’t what it used to be. I’m hungry all the time, and I have no idea why all the antimatter disappeared. Maybe I should be … Continue reading Late
I wonder what it would feel like to jump Out of this moving vehicle. To just keep rolling As the train disappears, just the smell of it left behind Like gin mixed with sulfuric acid. And I, Still spinning furiously, a tumbling gymnast Balled up into the forest. Muddied limbs — batons Punching the earth … Continue reading Rolling Out From Moving Vehicles
empty beer bottles and empty banana skins. an open, half-empty and half-stale sliced pan. used plates and take- away boxes. nothing with lipstick stains. books on the table. a coffee pot, inside turned yellowing brown like the pits of a ten- year-old t-shirt. — DS MAOLALAI DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of … Continue reading The Kitchen While You’re Gone
She cracked the air with her words, split the trees from their bough, tore stars from their night. Love fell from a thrown disc of sun to fill the back of his eyes. The courtyard framed the wetted stone for its own pleasure, and when pleasure met fate, all was dreamt and loamy about. And … Continue reading Art
Inside my dream, a dream. A cat sunning itself in the bay window. A small party. Silk, satin, some other materials. There are strangers who have loved me. There are lovers who have left me. I have written tirelessly about both. Fast traffic. Wet snow. The sound of acrylic nails tapping on a wooden bar-top … Continue reading Listen, I Need To Tell You Something
Trash Day is always an accomplishment: I lug those full, stinking cans to the curb like I’m walking down the red carpet in an underfunded coronation for conquering another week, having spent the last seven days alternating between washing dishes and disarming intercontinental ballistic missiles buried beneath my home state: It was Monday I was … Continue reading The Disarmament
FRANKLIN, Tennessee, is a long way from Denver, but Bodie was determined to get there by nightfall by plane, by bus, by train. He had no tickets, no plan other than a prearranged meeting with his father made several weeks ago over the phone. It was the first time they had spoken in months, and … Continue reading East, South, Acceptance