The Creature In The Tree

A creature made of gears fell from the top of a ridge and impaled itself on a small tree. Its jaws opened and closed with loud metal groans while the twigs and branches worked their way between the teeth of its inner mechanisms. Eventually it could no longer move and it’s only functioning systems were […]

The Fountain Pen

Numbers stick to us like magnets on a fridge. Even as we lay in pieces in a pile of rusted cars and melted plastic baby dolls. The scavengers circle over head fighting for minor clauses to be squeezed into the blind corners of mandatory documents. They dip their sharp beaks into the puncture wounds and […]

Modern Mollusk

People beat each other with pipes harvested from dismantled chain link fences for the attention of the people on the sidelines. The ladies paint their nails paying them no mind and the gentlemen go back and forth to the warehouses where all the metal comes from. It is melted down and shaped into the various […]

Get It Out

A group of surgeons slide blades into tissue to separate the skin, and they root around with hooks and forceps to find that thing you say makes you act the way you act. It’s elusive and bends back into the the blind spots when they get it on the ropes, which takes a toll on […]

Where She Wants To Be Today

A girl sits in a clearing and rips grass out of the ground then tries to stack the blades on top of each other but the wind makes it difficult to keep the tower standing. The boy who drove her there is using his knife to scrape mud out of the pattern at the bottom […]

A Fist Fight In The Gallery

An admirer stood in a trance at the foot of his most favorite Nora Talbot painting. It was a self portrait she did when she was still young, ten years before her head would explode from all of the cocaine, heartbreak, and aneurysms. He let his eyes soak in every inch of her cloud white […]

The Ramp Maker

I am rounded up by the people who skate in the empty lot on the corner of my street, and they say they need me to help carry something heavy. I believe their need is genuine, so I follow the posse of scuffed helmets and hand me down t-shirts to a crummy plot of dirt at the end of the […]

Trash In The Street

There’s a metal plate of unknown origin spinning like a coin in the street. Its faces never meet the ground because a transcriptionist sees it from her patio and rushes out to keep the roads clear of anything that could get in somebody’s way. She holds it loosely, by the rim, between her palms to avoid touching […]

Bad Friend

When my friend died they lined up and down the street to say goodbye. Girls in tight sequence dresses and old teachers in fuzzy cardigans, were all crying softly to themselves waiting for their turn to touch his cold face. I don’t know why human beings need to touch things but if I had to […]

A Familiar Place

I don’t give a fuck about anything. Not since the sound started ringing perpetually in my ears. It makes my stomach sick to listen, but I’m afraid of what’s behind the lower volume. You pulled on the drawstrings that came out of my hood, making the fabric tight around my neck. I tell you all […]