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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On this dreadful August day
I knew,
my loyal friend,
my scruffy white shadow,
you’d soon be leaving.
Then the grocery delivery arrived,
forgotten order
left on the stoop
beneath the clearest cyan sky—
and as if to mock me
contained
the season’s most perfect watermelon.
I cut into its flesh,
so flawlessly ripe,
unable to taste its sweetness
or appreciate the pink
that on other days,
would have made me thankful
for such simple pleasures.…
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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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