Oliver surveyed his beloved street from his front porch, a glass of lemonade in his right hand, an easy smile etched onto his boyish face. It was one of those delightfully crisp days in early fall, with a sky so clear that a person might have seen all the way to Chicago, if only the world was flat. Setting down the lemonade, Oliver unrolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt. With evening fast approaching, the autumn chill had begun to bite. Off to his left, Lake Michigan made a glittering appearance—a sun-speckled artwork framed by the street’s townhomes. The charcoal smell of the evening air filled Oliver with a pleasant nostalgia for his childhood. But Oliver did not wish to be young again—he was having far too much fun being twenty-seven.…
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Summers mean walking
every morning, listening to pink and orange
music as the drifting turns into waking.
I see dead birds along the sidewalks morning to morning and think of…
I think differently now, I acknowledge the birds and say my internal prayer
and thank them.
One morning I take an egg from the sidewalk
abandoned, rested on my desk for a week
only to explode while on the phone with a friend.
…………….The windows are down in the still-daylight summer evening and as I make my turns to downtown – teens walking alone/in pairs along the reaches of the sidewalk streets—I see the flashes of lightning in the blue in between rooftops like flashlights
…………….beneath the skin.
…………….With my windows down,
…………….…
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A quiet stairway at summer camp. The scent of redwood trees. We sat on the steps and talked. We discovered each other the night before. That next day, we blew off all the camp activities and spent the day together.
We laughed at each other’s stories. Your voice was soft and low; your eyes younger yet wiser than mine.
We lived too far away from one another to really make a go of it, but we tried anyway. Far from the days of algorithms and the forever-instant-now, we exchanged addresses and promised to write. I wrote to you in my tortured grade school cursive; you wrote back in clean, smooth lines.
All the letters from you I kept snug in a paperboard box. I crave to read them now.…
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Something out of the corner of his eye. A flash of primary color, a sense of a person lurking just beyond peripheral vision. The gag reflex of strong perfume. When he spun around, nothing lurked outside his windows on Central Avenue, besides the ebb and flow of car traffic. Constant distraction right when he didn’t need it.
George Lynch had never suffered writer’s block before. He was a copywriter for hire. Wrote whatever needed to be said. Whatever paid. This project was different though. George had worked on a number of assignments for Judd McBrunt. And Judd insisted on calling, not texting, to further annoy and derail George’s train of thought. Yet he had to pick up. His office being the desk in an apartment in Bellington, a small city along California’s south coast.…
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Every afternoon she parked and walked off at five past four, leaving the car for her ex-husband who lived opposite my office, her clothes changing as the trees changed, wrapped up as leaves fell, insulated under bare branches, exposed flesh returning with green’s return.
Skeletal trees appeared again. I watched her parking, expecting to see candelabra-tree shadows on her disappearing back; but she walked towards her ex-husband’s flat, the first time I had seen this, her arms swinging, back upright, intention gripping her face.
She entered her ex-flat. Then: SWERRAAAACCCC!
My work colleague looked at me.
“A car back-firing?” I offered.
“I didn’t hear a car,” Peter replied.
“OH MY GOD!” the ex-husband screamed. “OH MY GEAWWWDDD!!”
X’s voice flailed tentacle possibilities in my head. Our manager crossed the road and knocked on X’s door.…
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We think of day and night in symmetry, in endless succession but day was born from the long cold pre-Solar night and in the heat-death of the universe will collapse back into night once more; time will end. And so this, the ticking of a great clock, is an odd instant between two faceless expanses of darkness. The symmetry we feel between light and dark, morning and evening is just a brief chapter in which light almost holds darkness at bay. It has rained too heavily all day to go out and now as the dusk draws in I sit at the small table by the window, at the top of the stair. The maid has brought me a lamp, some quills and ink from my study.…
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Today, Casy is wearing soft green slacks, the color of elephant ear plants. Her thin hair is pulled back in a sensible tail. However, as always, she has found a way to add bits of personality to her business outfit: a gold pin clipped near her hairline, the locket strung around her neck. It is her mother’s. She wears it every day, even though it’s made of copper and is leaving a subtle green stain across her collarbone. Her mom died four months ago tomorrow, and the pain has not lessened.
I haven’t seen her mom. Like her daughter, she always had things in order and never had regrets.
I watch as Casy walks towards the bus station, her strides firm and direct. The angle of her platform boots makes her lean back when the road slopes downwards.…
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