Altars

Stuffing everything you can into a suitcase. Leaving all the motor mouthed spectators in their seats with the lights down, expecting more after the intermission, only to be disappointed. So much of the writing on the walls is about making us forget whose life we’re actually in. Like curved mirrors they distort what could be […]

Repeat

Messages on fake phones. Familiar cars in the driveway. The woman two houses down has a bad habit of taking in all kinds of strays. Kids with giant headphones stare out the school bus windows in the early mornings before the sun is up. They are pretending the music in their playlists are their theme […]

Late May

Hanging out, walking down the narrow walkways they put on the sides of steel bridges. Going down all the hills in the neighborhood is a lot easier than making your way back up them. A bent nail is driven into old boards they salvaged to make themselves a back deck, it’s holding together just about […]

Under The Pine Needles

The smoke at the back of her throat makes her feel like she’s been yelling her whole life. Which she has, but that’s beside the point. The real truth is in what caused her to raise her voice in the first place. Another day at the machine carving out metal circles with a mill and […]

Black Curtain

Night time rats cross empty streets and two people walking take note of how the water tower lines up with the center of the road. Taking direct paths through the grass while running late; they draft excuses in their heads. Metal tables slide against the concrete, pushed by the wind, and grind claw marks into […]

Broke

Paper faces hanging in the hallways pieced together with crumpled construction paper, and plastic eyes. They aren’t allowed to go near the squirrels that hang out below the walnut tree. Instead they just look at them from far away and toss them the crust from their sandwiches. Cold blood on the metal chains that connect […]

Highest Floors

You can see how streets are laid out from the highest floors of buildings like the one, with big antennas, in Chicago. Roller blades leave marks like black scars on the surfaces at the bottoms of empty pools. The realtor stops by in the mornings to mop them all off with a bucket of bleach. […]