Sketch

She draws the consequences of giant robot punches on the paper from the printer in the stock room. Circuitry and metal like flesh and blood and vein falling from a face modeled after our own. On other days she etches out rock stars from different eras that didn’t exist. She wasn’t as pleased with these […]

Koi

She tries to cut her hair, but the scissors won’t bite. Rusted from the rain because her roof has been gone since the meteor shower. An incomplete suit of armor from way back in the past droops off its stand like the shell of a discouraged soldier. Empty houses cut the shadows that fall along […]

Same

The clock hands are knives and their rotation peels my skin much like a deer dragged back from nowhere to be food in someone’s freezer by the morning. I have no illusions about what I am to them just a pair of hands that know the flow of things, anything beyond that is an unprofessional […]

Spirals

She worries about her outdoor cats and all the gnats that circle her kitchen sink that isn’t even dirty. Rearranging furniture on her own, just to prove to herself that she could, is how she wound up crushed between her carpet and the bookshelf getting wind back in her lungs with shallow breaths. She witnessed […]

Steps

A boy and girl take turns kicking one of those bulky old radios down the concrete stairs in an alley by their parent’s apartment building. The music gets distorted by the gravity until one of the massive batteries drops out and leaks acid onto the pavement. They were masters at breaking things they weren’t supposed […]

Left

Dead Christmas lights laced loosely through a nearly shattered window dangle there. Smokestacks in the foreground ahead of clock towers and glass tunnels between unrelated buildings. Stone staircases where people sit and wait for their rides in the cold. Forced to watch the square because they can’t send text messages through their mittens. This winter […]

Ordinary

The drywall smelled like ash, but it was new. T.V. static headaches covered up the words we were all supposed to nod along with. Limitless people all confined by the ordinary that is always the subject of a plan to put as much space between us as possible. Compare how safe you are, how free […]