The Bookends Review

The email draft sits unsent.
Not because I don’t know the words,
but because I do.

My phone buzzes,
and I let it.
The silence is easier
than explaining myself
to another rectangle of light.

I’ve learned how to smile
in the doorway,
to shrug when someone asks,
How’s it going?
They don’t really want to know.…

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He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. Suddenly waking – choking on some saliva that slid down his windpipe. He rolls clumsily off the sofa and lands hard on the threadbare shag carpeting on all fours.

Struggling to breathe through his nose while at the same time barking hoarsely in an effort to expel the slime trail of drool invading his trachea.

Once he stops coughing. Catching his breath. Aware of the strange click coming from the phonograph console, a relic from the 1970s that had belonged to Jennifer. It was one of the few possessions she had brought into their lives when they moved in together in the late 80s.

He remembers now that he’d been listening to The Very Best of Loretta Lynn.…

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The truth was not that we were the only ones. It was that we were the last ones: the only ones left.

The whales knew. 

In their infinite wisdom, and with characteristic empathy, the whales recognized not only that the doom was upon us humans, but that they had the ability not to stop it but to mitigate its effects.  In a world of growing despair and certainty of the end of all, the whales realized that they of all creatures had the ability to be harbingers of joy to those whose world-weary civilization was about to collapse upon itself.

Enthralled, shouting with delight, the passengers on the Queen of Capilano ferry in Howe Sound watched in wonder as two humpbacks breached in tandem; just the week before, other commuters had witnessed a pod of orcas frolicking in the blue-green waves. …

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The wars never end,
nor does the bloodshed,
and it makes men rich.
The world has gone crazy.

The children continue to starve,
their cries fill the air,
Elsewhere food is wasted.
The world has gone crazy.

The water, air, and food are poisoned.
The oceans and its life are dying.
Mankind can’t see the forest for the trees,
that are falling to the axe of its own greed.
The world has gone crazy.…

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– Larissa Monique Hauck…

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Jack and I sat like gods on nice, flat chair-sized rocks right outside the mouth of the mine shaft. We looked down and watched the two idiots hop across the mossy creek stones. Sure enough, the fat one slipped and landed on his butt. I looked at Jack. He shook his head, took a short nip out of the pint bottle, and tucked it in the back pocket of his jeans. I didn’t consider that to be a safe place to store a glass bottle, especially when you’re inside a mountain, mining gold. My little brother isn’t as smart as me though.

The idiots finally made it across the creek and started climbing up the slag pile. They didn’t look like much, but that’s what you get when you recruit your help out of the Crazy Horse Saloon.…

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They thought they buried her
beneath silence,
beneath shame,
beneath the twisted shadows
of what was never her fault.

A girl, broken open
before she knew what “no” could mean.
Her innocence wasn’t lost
it was stolen, stripped
by hands that never knew the weight of consequence.

But still,
she breathed.
Each day she woke
with trembling limbs and fractured dreams,
but she woke.…

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