They called it a flop house, I guess for lack of a better, more modern word.
It was really an abandoned factory that no one ever cared to demolish.
Its lobby was once a shop floor that could barely keep lit with the flickering, weakened incandescent bulbs on the walls. The bulbs and their sconces were sticky with cobwebs and soot and all the filth that blew in every time the door was opened. All of it layered on top of the grime that was already there from the days when the factory was open and busy.
Back in the days when people cared about it. Only a few of us cared about it now.
An old-fashioned cigarette machine stood guard next to the desk. After all these years, it still worked and somehow it was always stocked with those old familiar smokes – Marlboros and Newports and Camels.…
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Brooklyn greeted me with a Bronx cheer. After the usual delays arriving at JFK, and the long lines waiting for a rental car, I began the final leg of my journey to the old neighborhood. Then I hit a patch of bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Belt Parkway, right at the Queens-Brooklyn border. My economy rental crawled past the “Welcome to Brooklyn: Home To Everyone From Everywhere!” sign.
It was July 2003, and I was on my way to my ten-year high school reunion. Perhaps I thought it would bring me some sort of an epiphany. At age 28, I was still on an uncertain and obstacle-laden path in life. Plus, the constant reminder of the successes of some of my high school mates didn’t exactly boost my confidence.…
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Pain ribbons through my legs, entwines with hamstrings.
She bites and cradles like a vicious lover.
I know all the ways to cleave the ache in half.
My baclofen, tucked away like a prayer:
the last scrap from a past I try to forget. If the need is such, offer me salvation.
The weight released. But I remain splayed out, waiting
To be held again.
I’m fluent in the scripture of medical textbooks:
Spastic dipeligia/lordosis/dorsal rhizotomy is
The silk of my body, is a case study of the effects of
Intracranial hemorrhage is
Selfishness from
Something above me.
– AJ Powell…
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My guy is pitched from summer’s throat all blessed and highly favoured.
Like the choir, men who shave pray twice.
First that silver wick against the treeline– he makes a lunch spot out of his jaw, some new place
to give thanks.
The second lives in those wooden stars, twinkling with proof that the sun did press her mouth to
his face and belt.
Oh to be a man and burdened with evidence that somebody loves you. Nerves singing hymnal
while he twists at his flaking skin, snow piling on bathroom tiles.
In the eye of autumn, and with no bruises to press for fun, he takes the love hangover out back
and shows it half the mercy of a man who shaves. The refrain stubbles over.…
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THE MORNING I stole my daddy’s gun, the summer heat had already baked the dew off the grass. I remember the metal felt warm when I wrapped it in my mother’s old shawl—the blue one she’d worn to church every Sunday before the preacher man came to town. Before Jenny disappeared. Before we stopped going to church altogether.
Daddy kept the Colt in his bedside drawer, loaded with five shells, one chamber empty. “Safety first,” he always said, though safety seemed a strange word for a weapon that had taken three men’s lives during his days as a deputy. He’d retired that badge the same week the preacher man arrived, saying he was too old for the job. Now I knew better. He’d seen something in the preacher man’s eyes that scared him more than any outlaw ever had.…
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Kyle never knew anything about his wife’s Aunt Mimi. If she ever mentioned her to him, it was nondescript; not enough for Aunt Mimi to be anything other than one more obscure relative. It was a non-issue when she informed him that her aunt was moving in with her mom and dad. That first day he met Aunt Mimi, she looked at him with an expressionless intensity.
“Come downstairs and say hi to my Aunt Mimi,” Heather told him. It was Sunday morning and Kyle had just woken up. When he walked into the kitchen, Mimi’s back was turned to him as she was rinsing out a cup over the sink. Heather was sitting five feet away at their round oak table sipping tea. Mimi turned around as soon as Kyle said, “Hi” Her abrupt response seemed more like a reaction to a command than a reply to a greeting.…
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What we leave behind
is not nothing.
It’s a haze around the morning sun.
It’s an unexpected change in direction of the wind.
It’s one frequency in the white noise
of those who came before,
undecipherable static in the background
of the lives of those still in the world.
It’s a shadow in the corner of the wall
in the room where our sons and daughters live.
It’s a small but persistent presence
that shapes what becomes
as surely as hope shapes the coming day.
– Ken Long…
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