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.…
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I referred to my stepfather as the Peanut Man for the majority of my kindergarten year. He hadn’t married in at that point, but his basketball shorts were in my mother’s closet and his mixed nuts in our cupboard. Nobody ate nuts but him. Thus, Peanut Man.
I still call him Jeff, but his name is on the mortgage and he came to my senior night for soccer. He moved me into college. He is my grade-school caricature, acclimated. We say “I love you” if I say it first.
Remarriage complicates love. Jeff’s introduction to me wasn’t watching his wife tear top-to-bottom to push out a product of them, but rinsing my blueberry-dyed vomit from Dora bedsheet while my mom scraped my crusted body with a washrag in a home that wasn’t yet his.…
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“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.…
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The act:
disappearing
the past, not dramatic
as it once was, reduce coated
paper
to black
white ash. Now a
click: gone forever, code
overwritten, the result is
the same:
you are
gone, I am here,
without. Over length, crimp,
curl of synapses, you appear,
or not,
your face
as true as I
remember, or not, &
your melodious voice is heard,
or not.
– Eugene Stevenson
Author’s Note: One of the reasons why I write is to make photographs from the daily rushes our lives produce. I cannot discard photos, no matter how painful. Some people do so easily, out of hurt, anger, resentment, or envy. Images that remain after the photos have been destroyed are those we carry in our heads & hearts.…
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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.…
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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.…
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A methane gas explosion has ripped through the mine, collapsing the shaft where I’ve been working and rendering me unconscious. When I come to, I find that I am bleeding profusely and the stabbing pain in my extremities tells me that I have suffered multiple fractures. Light still shines from the headlamp on my mining helmet, though, and searching the darkness, I see that my shift mates have not been as lucky: they are buried deep beneath the rubble of the decimated shaft. Had I not gone back to grab a pick from the coal car, I would have surely suffered the same fate. My only hope is to survive long enough for the brave men of the mine rescue team to find and evacuate me safely out of this hell hole.…
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