As she slips the five bucks into my cup, I look up from the sidewalk and mumble, “God bless you.” An exhilarating shock runs through me as I watch her saunter down the street, a cluster of bittersweet memories bursting upon my mind. My wife… That’s my wife… Was my wife.
No longer that distant figure on the charred landscape of my youth, no longer a nocturnal phantom haunting my tent under the overpass, but a person of flesh and blood, proof that I once lived and loved in this city that now recoils from my poverty and despair. I get to my feet and stumble after her as she window-shops, her hand gently pulling a young boy along. Over the last fifteen years I dreamed about her a lot… but not so much lately.…
...continue reading
I just got word. My elementary school’s scheduled for demolition tomorrow. It’s a devastating announcement. Something doesn’t sit right with deliberately tearing down a building built to educate—to encourage learning. This place was the primary setting of my childhood; now in a matter of hours, it’ll be bulldozed, and all that’ll remain is a pile of dusty rubble over its concrete foundation. It was my foundation too. I’m stunned. That blocky brick building where I pined after my first crushes and learned to read and write. Gone. My childhood, leveled. What becomes of memories once their physical tether’s been removed?
In fourth grade, we had this grueling geology exam where we circled the classroom like vultures, identifying rock samples laid out on desks. I failed it—miserably.…
...continue reading
This morning it poured my glass of Wild Turkey bourbon on A Farewell to Arms, made a paper airplane from an Appalachian Power bill, subscribed to Glamour magazine against my will. Sometimes it squirts toothpaste across my mustache and draws smiley faces on the mirror. It pinches baby cheeks on city buses, fixes tags on strangers’ t-shirts, texts my ex in the middle of the night.
It’s been three months since Moira packed her bags and moved out. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she said. The fighting, the infertility, my drinking—it was more than she could bear. But the affair was what finished us. I’d betrayed her body by giving mine to another. She wanted to forgive me, to move on, and she tried, but something had died between us that we couldn’t get back.…
...continue reading
“Zurich-Basel departing from track eight,” says a woman’s buttery voice.
Zurich is a mispronunciation of Turicum which may itself be a variation on Turicon or possibly turris, tower or high building. Turicum’s gone. So is the turris, if it ever existed. Zurich remains. Life is so often an outcome of misconception.
Granite, marble and iron bend in a supple morning stretch. The spokes of the glass ceilings and the muntins of the vaulted windows convert sunbeams into dust-traced pillars. Luminous squares hopscotch the station hall.
Those who work here have christened it the ‘jail bars effect’. The cubicle-bound, the railway waiters, the bratwurst grillers are stationary, going no place. Wall-mounted flat screens flash ads. Timetables roll transient numbers at commuters. Strung up by their wings, kitsch sculptures dangle from the ceiling.…
...continue reading
When I first heard about snuff poetry readings, I was loudly skeptical. People have been trying to make poetry matter again, ever since it abandoned lyric to singer-songwriters, and left form to the good folks at Hallmark — who’ve since abandoned it — but the rumors and manifestos always come to nothing.
I pronounced the idea “morally suspect” because, let’s be honest, anything new or popular is bound to be.
From my point of view, the only Literary form worth pursuing is the neo-Tatlerian essay. Without that, we are nothing.
Still, I gave it a try, because I was stuck in a boarding lounge and I’d run out of other things to check on my phone. It was that or learn Armenian. Well, Byron learned Armenian and look what happened to him.…
...continue reading
Two blocks from the house I grew up in sit the remains of the Sarnia General Hospital. I still miss it. After all, I was born there on October 15, 1993; and my father was born there on February 17, 1947; and his father died at a hospital nearby on January 13, 2000. And that’s not even the end of it: the family name came back when his father died at the Sarnia General Hospital on May 29, 1951. My great-grandfather’s son also died there on July 30, 1992; and so did his daughter on September 13, 1996. Runs in the family, I suppose.
We used to play hide-and-seek around the remains of the hospital late at night. Some of the windows on the fourth floor were still in place; others were boarded up with beat-up sheets of plywood, which let drafts of air and animals inside, amongst other things.…
...continue reading
Take Up
Meeting, kissing, thinking, not thinking, talking, not talking. No need to think and talk. No need to wonder why anything is. It just is. This is what love is. It’s about passion. It’s about the sex. The sex is passionate. It is brilliant. Yes.
Shake Up
So much so all my past experiences are thrown into the air. I am questioning everything that went for sex before. How could I have lived the years I’ve lived and never seen sex could be like this? All my ideas and former awarenesses break up; go bitty. Rattle around.
Fake Up
I am happy in the bedroom but…..
What about sometimes when we are out together? What about when we are sitting at the table, say? Or sitting down together somewhere not at the table?…
...continue reading