Dark

Empty swings hover above the ground when it’s dark out and there’s no one in the neighborhood. People just outside rip parking tickets off their cars and drive home from the bars. “Just stay between the lines” is all they tell themselves. We see things so much clearer from the roof and so we clamber […]

The Star

There’s a ninja star embedded in the arm chair, sitting in the open wide garage. Every couple hundred years we tear the cities down, just to put them back the way they were before. All the empty places are slowly filling. With, if nothing else, the excess from the rest. We spend our time just […]

Angle

There is no morning that’s just what we call a certain angle of the sun when things get brighter very slowly, and the whole world has to look at what it’s done. Household demolition with a sledge hammer did nothing but teach me it was okay to destroy what I was finished with. I pretend […]

Marooned

I don’t care if anyone comes to find me, I am fine. The fishing is easy out here, and there’s a sturdy cave that staves off all the rain. I never knew before how much I needed pain until everything that numbed it wasn’t anywhere, that I could get to anyway. Everyday, I am submerged […]

She Doesn’t Wait For Everyone

Wendy pours coffee into a foam cup for a man who reads the paper with his back against the lowest window of a skyscraper. She sits in the wings of the community theater and watches her friends pace around in costumes and have fake arguments about made up people. She waits on a bench with […]

Innovation

Streetlights, that turn the air around you blue, hum quietly beside you as you balance on the steep and narrow curb. I spin a knife in my hand while I think and barely notice when I finally cut my thumb. You tell me I should try to sleep, and I explain how I’m planning to […]

Fireproof Upsides

The salamander felt nothing on the burning paper plate at the top of the trash can. It burned down through the plastic then calmly the lizard just waited for it all to be ash. When finally burned it gave up on the grass feeling something close to understanding. It was safer in the fire so […]