The Carver

A box fan that was as clouded as a smoker’s lung didn’t cool down anyone. It sat in the corner of her workshop where she carved things out of wood. Her knives like a family tree, most of which forged from the same chunks of carbon and iron. The handles all made of deer bones […]

Dead Engine

A rusted car with no hood parked too close to a sapling, long ago, now snared by branches growing in between the gaps of a dead engine. A gray cloth tacked to the white wall of a studio apartment at the edge of the city. It is used as a screen by the spacey tenants […]

Sandlot

An empty neighborhood baseball field with weeds tearing through the sand like index fingers through the membranes of plastic grocery bags. I sit in the bleachers still silver after all this time. An old wooden bat has grass growing through it making holes and removing the varnish. A faded banner for a lost team haunts […]

Confirmation

She pulled the letter out of a booth cushion, at a diner downtown. The old fake leather cut smoothly against the blade of her roommate’s pocket knife. Who was sitting across from her keeping watch for the pacing manager, through the small square of glass in the middle of the kitchen door. She read the […]

Wonder

No one knew what they were doing sorting out the world in words and pace of war. Always wanting more, the food fell from their mouths as they consumed it. Harnessing all perceived weakness through a persuasion that only what they cared about was real. Polar bears biting down into the flesh of seals keeping […]

The Sides

No one else is up it’s just her. The light bulb in her desk lamp is blue. The medium wraps itself around everything. We are a mark on it a scar made out of scar. She got one at the bar splintering cracks in table wood. The dark tree sacrificed for nothing. Like magic visions […]

Tropes

A pure white stag with eyes like setting suns and pupils the same shape as infinity. Tangled in its antlers is about three feet of razor wire drawing blood that drips down across its face. An asteroid in stable orbit home to a sleek factory. Where the rough shapes of human bodies are carved out […]