Tempo

People talking at the entrance to a dance and to their side is a girl, dressed just as nice, drinking wine from a bottle, on the curb, because chatting is boring. Billiard players missing all their shots, leaning back in their chairs with their forearms pressed against their foreheads, not knowing what it is they […]

Backboard

A basketball net hanging by a single loop from a broken backboard, and a rusted hoop. Styrofoam cups in the holes of the fence praising the work of our global defense. Satellite lasers cut words into the Earth. They can’t be read from the ground so we don’t know what they’re worth. Don’t hold on […]

Signs

Green signs above the highway so apparent in my vision, but quite far from what I’m thinking about. I am thinking about her and all the magic things she says while cutting up junk mail marked in bland ink with both her name and mine. The privacy fences in the neighborhood do little for actual […]

South Main

I watched a red haired girl, from the window of my car, while I was stopped at a busy red light. She was in a long black dress, covered in roses, that looked painted. A cloud of smoke trailed her wherever she went from the cigarette she held between her fingers. Further up the road […]

The Hall

She tells him he is paranoid and brushes pencil shavings off the table where he has been sitting all night, with a knife, just making them sharper. She likes to dry the flowers out, so even though they’re dead they still look pretty. She’s like a mortician embalming corpses, replacing their blood to preserve the […]

Pantry

Cheap mulch the color of the desert, full of pink flowers all bred to look exactly the same, all trimmed to restrain any grit; never able to spread out toward the sun, tamed to look beautiful and never die. At the edge of their world is a parking lot where people line up for food […]

Electricity

Unloading guns to count the bullets, each of them with faces drawn on them like missiles on a fighter plane. We do our part every day, but no one really knows where it’s all going, what final picture our collective effort is painting. I’m becoming more doubtful that it is beautiful. People wash their faces […]