I spun the second quarter into the slot, visualizing its journey through the works and gears and levers until it splashed into the metal box deep inside the bowels of the glowing, glorified refrigerator. A magic trick of the imagination.
Sad when that’s all a guy’s got.
Stepping back a half pace, I considered my selections. Choosing a beverage for study hall shouldn’t have been difficult. After all, I did this every day. What I wanted was a Diet Coke. But in the land of macho seniors sporting full beards and beer guts (and that was just the girls!), I had to be careful not to bring undue attention to myself, forced to answer for my wimpy taste in soda.
I usually went with a Coke.…
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Chris Jerold picked the pimples on his cheeks in ninth grade Algebra class. Only Algebra. Nancy Johnson knew because she sat behind him in Algebra, English, Spanish I, and Health. She also knew he tried to stop the bleeding with tiny pieces of notebook paper and didn’t use his shirt sleeves anymore because Mrs. Wren, the English teacher, mistook the bloodstains for rust and called the custodians demanding Chris’ desk be replaced. “Look at the rust stains on his shirt.”
Chris Jerold was the kid everyone avoided and ignored. The last time he fit in was the middle of eighth grade, just months before the tiny pimples on his nose spread like chicken pox down his cheeks and neck. He convinced himself that by scratching the bumps into scabs it looked like freckles from a distance. …
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Desire closes off
my airway. My girl with her steady hands,
with her art-show nails, with her
little gold necklace she hasn’t taken off in years.
I was passed out in a Paris apartment.
In my dream: two necklaces. A fish and a fish skeleton.
Next day at the fair: fish skeleton necklace. A sign from
the high heavens that,
even though I was feral and rabid-confused,
fate seeked to leash me to her bike rack.
Who could forget our
vomit-speckled Honda civic and her sweet
indifference?
The science museum: the universe condensed
and made molasses so it could slip down
our seven-year-old throats and satiate the mouths that always
breathed out: why and how.
We both yearn for the days of cold, plastic dolls
and synthesized dramatics and finger foods.…
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My mouth gnaws at your bloated
throat, clogged with plastic
straws and drawn-out footnotes.
This sagging jaw, broken by sorry
lovers, wags like a shredded red
flag. If I’m ranting nonsense,
I’m fed up. Lord, please remove
this cup. Inhale this smothering
fog with angelic chants. Release
the panting pups clawing
at your flawed law, jumping
at your heels. What must it be…
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I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life: “She died peacefully.”
Three hundred faces tilted toward me like sunflowers following a false light. My mother’s dental colleagues, her bridge club, the neighbors who’d borrowed sugar for thirty years. All of them desperate to believe that cancer was something open to negotiation, something that understood manners.
She’d clawed at the bed rails until her fingernails split. Begged me to kill her with the same voice that once sang me to sleep. Called me a coward when I couldn’t, the word sharp as a scalpel, designed to cut deepest where she knew I already bled.
Behind the podium, my hands performed their choreography of grief—steady, controlled, professional. I’d inherited her surgeon’s hands, the ones that had extracted wisdom teeth while humming Beethoven.…
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“You did it again!”
“I swear I didn’t.”
After experiencing yet another ‘accidental’ kick to the shins, the long-suffering office administrator levelled a glare at her colleague. She wished their desks weren’t parallel so she wouldn’t have to see his smirk every day. She wished for a spacious office, not this cramped and freezing old building— practically a crypt. To be completely honest, she wished her long-legged coworker were on the moon.
Another dreary day of spreadsheets and coffee breaks. Plus the heating was on the fritz again. Since the clocks went back, the sun set around four which should be illegal, in her opinion. It made her jumpy, the idea of the office lit up from within, anyone at liberty to peer in from outside…
So much of one’s life gets swallowed up by the office, she thought rather gloomily.…
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Last night: her first time in a hell I was familiar with,
The love song of the void, the sublimity
Of the open road and the way breath hitches
As the headlights strike. Standing in wait. And the grace
Of the driver and the lack of a collision.
The whole world opened like a peroxided
Wound.
Meanwhile:
I tried to stave off nausea a hangover couldn’t cure.
I paid for my own drink and gave it away.
I walked home: lone soul meandering on
The concrete.
I was shaking and
ragged-breathed like
A shot dog.
Cosmic thread strangled
My finger,
Semi-necrosis a sign from her
The world would soon end.
– AJ Powell…
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