The stars peck our eyes as the night’s chemical grin rises. The wind plants a good-luck kiss on your cheek. We climb down the ladder, my hands behind your knees as we clear the last rungs. We have always touched as strangers; now our hands slide around each other lizard-like in a dark kitchenette. A … Continue reading Baby’s On Fire
Turns out the penthouse suite doesn’t suit me, too posh and roomy for my delicate tastes. Give me life’s honest feeling; the cold concrete and steel of burning basements; the creak of a cratered rooftop. Luxury reeks like a toxic tonic, a sick and sour salve to soothe self- inflicted wounds (ingredients include juice of … Continue reading Hymn to Riches
Just once and in the spirit of whatever winks please help me create a dearly different religion Steeped in hoot toot and with whistling almighties All given over unto and believed in with heavens upon from the get go Yes teach me how to sing like vines on porches or as spit-jokes do or as … Continue reading Given Over
So yes, cheetah-print carpet did whine something sensual as I pressed into it, coaxing me further upstairs because Is this what everyone else knew about? Hotels, spaces, glamorous enough for one’s own reinvention? because who really belongs here but the sharpened spiders crawling along the roof we peek over, fairy lights cutting their silhouette? Later, … Continue reading We’ve Never Been to This Part of Downtown
Your feet speak as they meet the scaffold stair: You brought this on yourself. It’s clear from the humorless way the garroter yanks your chain that he hates his work. You soften to the pillory’s kiss: its wooden hug whispers of headless love. The crowd squawks in unison. Your eyes empty themselves. The blade whistles … Continue reading Guillotine
God forgive us if this world, a world torrential with our cyclonic tempers, be the last world created. Not that we are all that ignorant of others nurtured by this planet to fruition, whether they be sea bottoms of trilobites or lands ravaged by tyrannosaurs. Those worlds pummeled into extinction by an errant asteroid or … Continue reading What Time Do You Have
No longer the vague whispers over an indistinct horizon. No clamoring church bells, only a doctor’s soft, clinical, sorry sounds. Do not doubt it. Rage does smolder in the brush of a dry land. Fears do bolt from the undergrowth. Soon, too soon, purgatorial fires – the chemo, the radiation – appetites shriveled, burnt down … Continue reading Just Diagnosed
they assault me in my dreams grinning disjointed sneers yawping chasms causing claustrophobic paranoia possession in summary distorted screams and inexcusable modes of shrieking tunnel vision dead ideologies and existential dilemmas squat bodied visions of ancient identities non-reality husks pose little threat to a cracked dream system — SCOTT C. HOLSTAD Scott C. Holstad has authored … Continue reading Dystopian Dreamscapes
My mind has a mind of its own, so in the morning, I’m going to self-test my bullet-proof vest. In the careless wind everything should go according to plan. Like they say, misery loves gluttony. That’s why I enjoy making every single minute of the day hyper-productive. Yesterday, for example, I was more than a … Continue reading Gotcha Covered
I’m not an astrophysicist. I’d rather leave my overture into the expanse to science — I don’t care what happens to the stardust clinging to my sequoia lashes once I take course downriver. Remember, this is ash we’re talking about. If, for whatever reason,I wink and nebulae explodeacross the water —the mortician has failedin his … Continue reading Burial