Trailer park, third row from the left, second from the end of the row, lemon yellow with white trim. Looked like a packaged pastry. Little Debbie cakes from from middle school lunches. The icing like plaster.
A man in the doorway, sinewy, unshaven, sleeveless t-shirt, jeans with a tin of chewing tobacco in the back pocket, hunting camo baseball cap with the Waste Management logo. He was holding a tallboy of Yuengling.
He smiled like he’d been told a joke “You must be the kid.”
The boy in his school uniform shrugged. The blazer was too big for him. He’d lost weight over the past year.
“Just call me Tierney.” Said the man.
“Shane.” Replied the boy.
“C’mon in.”
Tierney sat on a secondhand couch whose cushions were running threadbare, festooned with pills like skin tags.…
...continue reading
Something goes bump in the night. A thick band of light streams into the dark cell from the rectangular window in the door and it grounds Chris Haley as soon as he wakes. There can be no doubt as to where he is.
Unseen in the darkness he hears forceful exhalations of breath and the smack of flesh hitting concrete. Chris fumbles for his invisible reading lamp.
“Sean?” asks Chris.
He finds the lamp and turns it on. Sean Coleman is doing burpees in the middle of the small cell. His thick chest is covered in cloudy tattoos. Swastikas and lightning bolts and all the regalia of hate. The man is a true believer.
“What are you doing, man?”
Sean does not stop. He does another burpee and exhales.…
...continue reading
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.…
...continue reading
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…
...continue reading
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.…
...continue reading
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?…
...continue reading
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…
...continue reading