Everyone’s in a tizzy at work over our co-worker but I’m not surprised. I text my friend, yo girl, haven’t seen you for a while. She replies, what a doozy of a week— District Psych Ward —phone use supervised. I think, doesn’t this happen to everyone eventually? When...
Issue Thirteen
Fifty- Five
There is a mountain you come upon that no one tells you about, sudden watershed, and once you crest it, the dead people you read about in the paper are no longer some people but your people, actors from your production, not your parents’, so the wakes and the funerals...
all the dead birds say i’m searching for smthng
they been whisperin to me lately: “time to stop. ur done. it’s over” and their voices are like leaves, or like gravel, or layers of skin. they need to stop; i can’t sleep with all their shifting calls. but now that one’s flown into my window i’m fin’ly done searching,...
Beast File No. 22
The night lights up like lightning. Not a single cloud in the sky. Only fireworks: red, white, and blue as far as the eye can see. Pop. Fizzle. Sizzle. Boom. There are lights on the tombs. Graves in the middle of nowhere. An old cemetery still in use. The lights on...
A Body Parts Comedy
Do you remember ten springs ago? Back in that season of renewal, I remember gulping down IPAs at a now-closed dive bar with my roommates. At Market & Fremont, we wobbled onto the crosswalk in a pack of testosterone as a klatch of estrogen strode toward us. Under...
Saltwind; When You Come Home
Saltwind Saltwind is like acidburn in the nose and throat. but feels cold in your stomach like rain in the breeze of an August day that is just warm enough to make you forget what page it is on the calendar. When you’ve realized,...
Normal Objects
When my daughter and I came to visit you, the razor in the bathroom was just a razor to you. A reminder of last weekend when your son came home from college. Maybe you wished he’d put it away because it cluttered the sink. Maybe you were glad he’d left it out, like an...
Choke; Sir, Yes Sir; and Serenade
Choke we eat the same words the t’s of each stick my throat like epicentralia older than words you must have chewed your share to softness but when I say I am full more bend loose and when I insist I really can’t take any more there are still more curving into the...
Three From Husband
Blue
Weeping indigo seeps across your skin in needle-pricked ink. His anger spills over the page; he cannot hear your voice. You try watercolour comfort. I find blue in your words, your bruised tongue lying peacefully. Forget-me-not kiss bleeding indigo into me. You’ve...