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 […]

Divide

A warm winter that maintains the gray skies, but doesn’t cover up the death with any snow. No one has a right to feel let down by anything because nothing is here for you, you are here as a protest against the nothing. A tree on the roadside is pulled apart by moisture and wind […]

Pontiac

The look on her face was so indifferent to the backdrop. Poorly aged interlopers smoked cigarettes and complained how no one saw them anymore. Their jackets commemorated their old jobs building cars up in Pontiac Michigan. She doesn’t know it, and neither do they, but the car she is sitting in is one that they […]

Viewless Hill

You couldn’t see anything from that hill but still we made our climb up its far side to know it for ourselves. Her with all the pictures of the world tucked in her backpack in a notebook that only she could see. Then there was me with nothing, but the smoke that I would exhale […]

Conscript

Close enough to hear the weakly commotion in the slaughter house, a man who drives a forklift spends his free time sanding bits of lumber so it can be made into something nice to hold, and look at. Carvings of horses mid-stride and dragons from books lined his shelves along with memories of just how […]