These are the facts we know: George died in 1883, a successful man. Three years later, my great-great-grandfather Joseph, who had followed his brother from Ohio to Kansas to Denver, abandoned his wife and children and lit out for California. It was where George had gone at the end, seeking treatment for a kidney infection no one in the 19th… Read more →
Wylie, TX Mom doesn’t like how short he is. “Elvis is supposed to be six feet tall,” she says. She’s painted my nails to stop me from biting. I keep the chewed-off ends in my pocket and prick the tips of my fingers whenever I think of the other boys at school, how they have hair where I don’t, how… Read more →
There’s just no scrubbing dawn clean enough to heal last night, or the night before; no muscling gray into motives, wine back into the bottle, its shattering into an intact object passed between hands to warm them. × I never knew words could be coffins. Or I did but didn’t care. Which of us is boxed up & ready for… Read more →
After your ex became your stalker, you moved from Northern California to a 2-bedroom apartment eighty miles southeast of Los Angeles where you looked out the front window while drinking coffee and watched one of the meth addicts who slept in the nearby river bank walk along the street commuters travelled to get to the freeway. Seeking safety and a… Read more →
What is my medium: a block of wood carved by what other people saw. Overwrought by eyes and lathe-workers thumbing me through the small pinch of what remains. I don’t claim to have the right way to dislocate all the barked ideas what it is to be human. Any body knows the false mystique of I’ve got this and you’ve… Read more →
I chewed raw macaroni, uncooked oats, dry field corn from a cob. Gnawed sleeves, collars, and nibbled away erasers. I pulled threads from sweaters, spun them against my mouth’s roof like dialing a compass, then pressed the acute tang of Play-Dough, its misshapen, any-colored fruit deep into my cheek. Someone later said I wouldn’t have licked a frozen metal bridge… Read more →
I am the room around you. When I died, I entered the refrigerator innards, the feathers spat on the bed, the cups on hooks drilled wall-wise in a starburst, the temple of dogshit on the floor, the trash schnauzered across the porch. You need to walk our dog. I am the water seaming pebbles at the tank’s bottom. I am… Read more →
There are zombies, or enemy fighters, or aliens coming at you and you’ve been here before. You know precisely which way their blood will pool, the red spreading in a crenellation of ones and zeros. There is no doubt whether this universe is deterministic; it is, in fact, determined, each zombie springing up precisely where he did before, eyeball lolling… Read more →
We both knew it was the shittiest carnival in the Tri-State area, but we were going anyway. During lunch, Susan and I went out for a smoke break and just kept walking. We walked through the football field and into the skeleton of the bleachers. Underneath, in the grey coolness, Susan pulled out stolen Home Ec scissors and cut off… Read more →