Pain ribbons through my legs, entwines with hamstrings.
She bites and cradles like a vicious lover.
I know all the ways to cleave the ache in half.
My baclofen, tucked away like a prayer:
the last scrap from a past I try to forget. If the need is such, offer me salvation.
The weight released. But I remain splayed out, waiting
To be held again.
I’m fluent in the scripture of medical textbooks:
Spastic dipeligia/lordosis/dorsal rhizotomy is
The silk of my body, is a case study of the effects of
Intracranial hemorrhage is
Selfishness from
Something above me.
– AJ Powell…
...continue reading
My guy is pitched from summer’s throat all blessed and highly favoured.
Like the choir, men who shave pray twice.
First that silver wick against the treeline– he makes a lunch spot out of his jaw, some new place
to give thanks.
The second lives in those wooden stars, twinkling with proof that the sun did press her mouth to
his face and belt.
Oh to be a man and burdened with evidence that somebody loves you. Nerves singing hymnal
while he twists at his flaking skin, snow piling on bathroom tiles.
In the eye of autumn, and with no bruises to press for fun, he takes the love hangover out back
and shows it half the mercy of a man who shaves. The refrain stubbles over.…
...continue reading
THE MORNING I stole my daddy’s gun, the summer heat had already baked the dew off the grass. I remember the metal felt warm when I wrapped it in my mother’s old shawl—the blue one she’d worn to church every Sunday before the preacher man came to town. Before Jenny disappeared. Before we stopped going to church altogether.
Daddy kept the Colt in his bedside drawer, loaded with five shells, one chamber empty. “Safety first,” he always said, though safety seemed a strange word for a weapon that had taken three men’s lives during his days as a deputy. He’d retired that badge the same week the preacher man arrived, saying he was too old for the job. Now I knew better. He’d seen something in the preacher man’s eyes that scared him more than any outlaw ever had.…
...continue reading
Kyle never knew anything about his wife’s Aunt Mimi. If she ever mentioned her to him, it was nondescript; not enough for Aunt Mimi to be anything other than one more obscure relative. It was a non-issue when she informed him that her aunt was moving in with her mom and dad. That first day he met Aunt Mimi, she looked at him with an expressionless intensity.
“Come downstairs and say hi to my Aunt Mimi,” Heather told him. It was Sunday morning and Kyle had just woken up. When he walked into the kitchen, Mimi’s back was turned to him as she was rinsing out a cup over the sink. Heather was sitting five feet away at their round oak table sipping tea. Mimi turned around as soon as Kyle said, “Hi” Her abrupt response seemed more like a reaction to a command than a reply to a greeting.…
...continue reading
What we leave behind
is not nothing.
It’s a haze around the morning sun.
It’s an unexpected change in direction of the wind.
It’s one frequency in the white noise
of those who came before,
undecipherable static in the background
of the lives of those still in the world.
It’s a shadow in the corner of the wall
in the room where our sons and daughters live.
It’s a small but persistent presence
that shapes what becomes
as surely as hope shapes the coming day.
– Ken Long…
...continue reading
In the land of nowhere the man of America is to be found,
in the pieces of nowhere America is to be found,
in the cares of nowhere America is to be found,
yet something is America that is everywhere,
existing in the madness of the grave itself,
but persisting in the sanctity of birth itself,
seeing that America is more than a name,
but an exhalation of one’s fate,
in which one shall be—
damned and loved,
prayed and screwed,
martyred and championed,
killed and crowned,
sought and left,
wept and laughed,
yet this is the land of truth,
whatever truth is,
meaning,
it shall always be—
forever and more,
eternally free.
– Frederick Schardt…
...continue reading
Here I am. Stuck under the potbelly of a forty-something-year-old, probably corrupt cop. He is squishing my face into the two-inch dense foam mat patterned like a red-and-blue checkered flag across half of the room. This is exactly what I need after the last few weeks of complete chaos. Being squished under an oversized man is the perfect poultice to remove me from the looming future that is sure to come and place me in the current moment. The sound of a decent rap song that has recently been bastardized into a soul R&B rendition, through the use of artificial intelligence, is drowned out every few seconds by the sweat of Potbelly’s rash guard pressing against my ear as I turn my face to the side to avoid being smothered.…
...continue reading