There were rats in our ceiling though I know you couldn’t hear them. The house was crowded, it was loud, little house reverberating with the sound of New Year’s tidings. You were speaking to your friend’s parents, the ones who work at a hospital, and my sister was planning her wedding. Everyone was talking, everyone…
The boxes beneath the tree tremor with soft scraping sounds etching into the cardboard from the inside-out. The tree is dry and I haven’t watered it since you dragged it into the house, put it up yourself and strangled it with lights. The strands flicker electrical shortages. I am in the armchair across the room,…
It was a dead monkey I heard say it, is how I know this to be true; deep in the verdant jungle where nature still appears real, the hunted-dead monkey said to me, “All life has a point.” I agree this is ridiculous, that a dead monkey spoke to me, but anyway that isn’t the…
Here are ten years spent searching for the antithesis of a life uselessly lent to Keurig machines brewing, daily traffic migrations idling, flat-screen TV’s streaming: Here are the screams of the mad-eyed peeling their scalps to let out the vacancies eating away at their brains. Here are the years spent shifting desks in dormitories where…
The future is felt like a big open sore, suppurating raw – like putting fingers in the wound, to pay the future any mind. I can give it no concern. I am supposed to file forms to meet important collegiate deadlines, but I think I’d rather just sit staring at the back of a stranger’s…
It began with a long day in bed when I slipped too deeply into my head… Short walk to class, an hour long now trying to avoid the eyes of each person I pass by. I am the person walking up and down the same flight of stairs, convinced, utterly convinced this is the quickest…
The college square has no strife, early morning in clear light, students passing in quiet voices spoken to friends. This – the soporific morning hum of students abiding schedules, making their ways to class – scene comforted by the recentness of sleep and waking dreams. Students texting, drifting by on long-boards, I sit here on…
America, I no longer wish to heal your wounds. I see your wounded nursing bruises from swift kicks received on the Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and a few times every Valentines’. I would like you to know I do not approve. But you see I might have to go to work tomorrow,…
She sleeps a turmoil in a tangle of sheets, respite from a 60-hour kitchen week; beside her I lie and I cannot blink, let alone sleep. I twisted the bed sheets and swallowed the knots and there they sit deep in the pit of my rotting gut. I have rolled through the muck and masturbated…
