god damn. things have changed
here. they do, and I don’t know
why I wouldn’t expect it. the crowds
packing camden like cans
in a freshly stocked fridge.
girls with tattoos and canal
birds which drift under bridges.
once I was here, and a thing
young and fresh as a beer
on a sunny afternoon on a patio.
stop at a bar I frequented
at 20. ask for a beer, read
a page from a book I just bought.
joe’s tavern is closed now
but the hawley is open. once
I would sit in this corner and see
the sky pouring like fluid
to glassware. after, I leave
and walk back toward kings cross
where my wife’s having lunch
with a friend. I’ve been 32 years old
for 6 months, which isn’t much.…
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In his eighties, our neighbor
still mows his grass while
singing “Hard Hearted Hannah”
as loud as the mower. When
he stops for a break or
to wipe away sweat, he gives
Hannah a rest, then
starts mowing again,
singing as loud as ever. He
doesn’t have a great voice,
but takes pleasure in the song,
in the singing,
an early afternoon
with azure sky
and a few clouds.
– Kenneth Pobo…
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Brora leaned over the balcony wall, taking a slap of wet wind to her face. She held tight to the iron baluster and wondered what it would feel like to uncurl her fingers and let herself fly. The palace courtyard was two stories below and paved with rough-cut flagstone. Some weeks earlier a young servant, suspected of treachery against the Earl, had been dangled over the east tower parapet then deliberately dropped, legs first. He hadn’t died, had been sent in agony by mule cart back to his co-conspirators in Stromness.
The balcony wasn’t high enough to kill her, but it surely was high enough to kill the poison that grew in her womb. Brora didn’t know if it was Lord Patrick’s bastard or his father the Earl’s, but she knew she wished it dead.…
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It had the power to transmogrify, to survive at any depth, to breath both air and water. It could subsist on literally anything it could scavenge from the lifeless ocean, and could swallow an entire ship in one gulp. And most improbably, though most importantly as well, it could turn invisible—even intangible. For this reason, the captain insisted, we had to search for the thing while it fed. Only when its belly was full, he told me, could it be discovered by sonar. And this was our greatest challenge, too: for the Beast, when fed, was in its heaviest, and therefore most dangerous, state. It could easily outweigh our hundred-foot catamaran. But how would we know when it fed, in any case? How would we find it?…
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It was unwise to believe,
that when Colombia departed from her mother
that evidence of her existence would rot
the same way that the night fades into memory
the second the calico punctures the sun
and bleeds out onto the water.
Her charcoal braid runs into the countryside, unravelling
becomes the gravity that divorces from God
water from the oil,
sunlight from the soil.
– Amalia Danilo…
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The god perches on a throne of bricks;
Behold a man’s body with a bull’s face.
Surrender presents to the ruler.
Outstretched arms will always reach for more.
A furnace forged of copper.
Jaw gaping, eyes radiating red,
maddening in anticipation of the meal.
Seven chambers in his chest feed air to the flames.
An archway exposes an opening into his belly;
Four stomachs are his true domain;
Rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum.
Wet acidic bile traded for dry ashes and hot coals.
Greed chars the kiln.
He is never full; feed him.
He consumes all humanity,
and it still isn’t enough.
– Maxwell Bauman…
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Tommy:
12-year-old MN Domestic Shorthair, brown tabby
After hearing the triage call through the speaker system, I waited in the doctors’ area for the nurse to return from the exam room. She gave me a brief synopsis of Tommy’s situation before I ventured in. Her somber words were a pale harbinger of what I would witness in that room.
When I opened the door, the sour smell of decay instantly turned my stomach. On the examination table, splayed in a makeshift bed of soiled terrycloth in an old Coors Light cardboard box, lay an obese cat—conscious, vocal, paraplegic. His hind limbs were cold and dead. Worse, he was lucid—acutely aware of his pain, and at least to me, pleading for deliverance.
Two women accompanied him. The first had pulled up a chair to the table where she crouched over him, whispering to him and stroking his head as I entered.…
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