★★★☆☆
Wait time was too long. I stood around for hours, but never got what I wanted.
★★★★★
This is it. The real deal. She will peel apart her ribcage and let you see her naked heart. She hides nothing; exposes everything, even the ugliest parts, the intestines, blood, rotten. All of it is on the page. (All of it.)
★☆☆☆☆
has never been to the bottom of the ocean. does not know what it is to truly cry. can not comprehend loss. mourns but is never mourned.
★★☆☆☆
Doesn’t make sense. Why can’t life be understood? Some of us want to know why we are here. No answers, just questions!
★★★★☆
at dawn she walked the shore to greet me in a hug. she was smiling.…
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“Mom, I’m scared,” Kai messages me. “They shaved Eloise’s hair off this afternoon. I think they’re going to put something into her brain. I want to come home.”
Regular communication between Academy students and their families is strongly discouraged, and Kai has not messaged me since enrolling in September. His note crushes the air out of my chest.
Of course, I panic. I floor it from Forest Cove to Sugar Glen, past the Monsanto Crispr AminoSoy fields, Night Market distribution centers, holovideo poker parlors, and Poppy Cig lounges. The Academy has no need for an iron gate because they have electric fencing, twenty-four-hour surveillance, and robot security guards. At Parents’ Weekend last month, I was reassured the Academy was protecting Kai from predators and conspiracy theorists.…
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Children search clouds
for bunnies and puppy dogs
but find only
stampedes of thundering water
buffalo, spooked
and hale horned, tsunamis
of great whites foaming
at the mouth.
Air coils
around their ankles
like snakes poised
to swallow whole.
– Brian Wallace Baker…
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How a love story begins: that bitch
pushed your name to me,
a perfect paper sailboat, and the
first thing I said to you was
“That’s what I want to name my son.”
The end of the story goes like this:
Summer has tipped students out the
library, we are the only two left
on the basement floor. You will stay here
shelving books into their tombs.
In these remains, we buckle,
my knuckles grip-locking you.
This is how to say goodbye.
Like expelled angels falling from the sky.
Biceps tremble into my shoulders so tight,
may the blades weld into wings.
May I fly to you every night,
to resume. On our way to 7-Eleven and
pause over every star. To bicker over
who packs the bowl, who pays for the food.…
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Tomorrow night, I cry as activity instead of catharsis.
This little bloodstained duvet twisted between my bruises.
Why are you still here? A bleached monochrome dance
I bore into at every cusp between late night and early
morning. The Notes app dream journal woven in
half-delirium, half-life, but within is what may have
truly passed, if there is such a thing. Such is the pied
piper of evening sky: are the transient pinpricks above
liminal windshield dust or celestial negative space?
This is why I shake Descartes’ hand; a pretense.
Grip his palms gurney-white as my blackened soles
demarcate love from convenience; dissonance from
flesh. A too-sterile chain of suspicion stretches half a
link before evanescing amorphous, bits of iron and
thought drifting upwards my guttural ceiling light.…
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I was with my friend Brad, working with him at his father’s sawmill. Brad’s mother came out and called to him.
“Michael’s needs to call his wife. His grandmother has passed away.”
I saw her face, immediately sorry I’d heard this way. Brad’s mother, like Brad and Brad’s father, were matter-of-fact people, not insensitive, but they usually delivered news with the same quietly firm tone of voice whether remarking on this year’s garden or the death of a loved one. They all cared about people and their feelings, but running a ranch and lumber mill, where death was a hard, but very real fact, they wasted no words on emotion or embellishment.
Brad and I started for the house. Then I stopped and suggested we finish what we were working on before going in.…
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Bred to move along, avoid the roundup,
to reign in the moan that jolts me
like a stone skipping a pond. When I dream
I declare to my dogs of half-sleep—
will you cry for me when the time comes?
Corgis & Labs, all off-leash—all those
stretches of grass made of sleep
flatten out past the rows of marked trees.
Today is marked by my brother’s death. He was
a companion and protector. Suddenly gone.
I am the one who remains, mulling
the question that woke me with something
about who owns what, how to mark it.
It’s not that we didn’t know death was coming,
the clues screamed in glazed surfaces.
I see myself as the stone thrown,
puzzling the gravity of heavy loss
and retching into a wet shirtsleeve.…
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