Customers would try on baseball jerseys and eagerly turn in front of a full-length mirror to see someone else’s name stitched on their back. They’d ask for the tag to be cut, and walk out with the jersey still on, the shirt they had worn in balled in a shopping bag. Who knows where they … Continue reading Names
I buy a fire engine just in case and look for signs of beetle kill in every tree that I climb to retreat for a while. There is something sublime about a lone red trash can filled with flames, steam wafting off tailpipes on a cold morning, the town whiskey spigot clogged and backing up … Continue reading Exhaust
I met a man I barely knew for tea — to see if I might catch the tail of something hard to hold, the way we do when we hear it’s raining meteors. In mere counter-moments we were mourning milestones robbed by frost — promises made mummies destined to summer, tombs on limbs. My insides … Continue reading Interrupted Magnolias
Listen: there’s nothing that can be done about it. Continents will drift about like bumper cars and the stars will spin drunkenly in the dark and atoms will slowly degrade into lesser atoms and sex and death will jostle for supremacy and it all happens well outside of our grasp. So who cares if my … Continue reading Poem for my Neighbors
Time becomes a butterfly with a broken wing humming in my hands; like it, I have been subdividing myself, dotting my poems with the blood beading on my cuticles, my mind as the land left on its own, riding out the cold. This is our hard stone over downy pillow, the mint on our palms … Continue reading Phrenospasms
The dark waters teem with catfish. You might catch one by casting a line and letting it flow downstream, the hook tumbling with the current, hoping one gifts you with a bite before the spool reaches its conclusion. This is the manifest of our destiny: to sponge water from the mountains and cut scars into … Continue reading Aqueduct
A square-shouldered steelworker in a hospital gown, pale as pearl, waddles the hallway pushing an IV pole on wheels, holding it firm as a handshake. His heart is beating in a cage, swelled like a sponge, vitals through the roof. Even though his modern watch doesn’t tick, he can feel his time slipping away, irretrievable … Continue reading Getting Straight
All trees are remarkable things. However, just yesterday I noticed a tree of such perfect form, it just deserves to have two people realize they have just fallen in love in the cool shade of its sweeping green canopy. — ANDY PERRIN Andy Perrin is a writer/photographer/cyclist/teacher (not necessarily in that order), from southern Rhode … Continue reading A Tree Of Such Perfect Form
The hellcats above the ceiling remain warm and busy. But also miffed about firecrackers at dawn. I’ve been bad and good and bad and good and so bad I wanted to die, so good mothers started a charity. Listen, no one has heaven cornered. One day, the kitties will fall through and, appropriately, eat me. … Continue reading Acceptance
You levitate with guilt because you ironed a man’s collars in place of his mother. Pressed yourself into a neat pleat, removing the septum ring, growing out the side shave at his demand. So concerned with how you’ve damaged your daughter by what she has seen. You want to talk about epigenetics? The compulsion to … Continue reading Gaia Talks Back