Luke weaved between honking, fume-belching metal to catch the bus coming up the other side of the road. The bus stopped just after taking off from a bus stop to let Luke on.
The quizzical faces inside the bus facing Luke espoused: “Why did he get on here?! Him?!”
No tourist sights existed where Luke had boarded, where English was limited, traffic chaotic, crossing streets perilous, traders screaming out prices, pedestrians mixing with horn-blowing vehicles, everything just missing each other as if controlled by satellites.
The bus’s aisle separated foreigners from locals in an Apartheid-like divide, the air inside the bus fresh after frying-meat smell and fumes mixed with dust. Luke’s sweaty face and the sweat patches on his shirt contrasted with that clothes-pressed-to-perfection enclosure. One of Luke’s shirt collars was up, the other down.…
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Therefore, I am
Prostrate before the moon and the sun
And the rain that followed, once again
The moon, the sun, and the rain that followed,
Once again
And forever more, I fear
For the flame that burnt my hands and eyes,
Charred the snow-hearted and scalded their brothers
Lay covered in earth, in ash, in suffocating pitch
Starved of fuel more potent than a prone body, prostrate before the moon
And the sun
And the rain that followed, once again
As I watch it fall, from clouds of nothing
– Izzy Fishbach
Author’s Note: Philosophers of all persuasions have spilled much ink debating whether it is possible to know that one exists, and if so, how to prove it. This poem is the opposite of that: it suggests that we don’t exist at all.…
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Christi had a birthday party scheduled over at The Glass; a gritty, cozy, and unwilling place to be. It was a bar and that was enough for me, I guess. Wednesdays are a good night to drink just like any other day of the week and it was one hell of a day. It was Christi’s twenty-third birthday and although the day was shit, I tried to have a good time. She phoned me.
“Are you coming tonight?” she asked. “It’ll just be a few of us. We’re meeting at The Glass at 7:30.”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
After work, I avoided the traffic on the highway and hit Dry Mill Road instead. It is a popular road for locals to bypass the highways, but too many people have caught on and now the traffic is just as bad as the main roads.…
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Fishermen are good at sea.
Strong arms, pull steady sails
In shifting wind,
In storm.
Rudders for left hips guid straight to streams pregnant with catch, so they may cast their nets in place of incantations.
Heave!
And here’s the day—easy. The water like a looking glass, they sit upon white decks watching the world. Fishermen are very good at sea.
When beached, the ground moves under them. Confident steps slide, awkward and uneven. The air too warm, the wind too dry. The sea just there, and not.
They’re caught
Right on the precipice of life—free to stare, but not enter.
There, they mend their nets. Knit fingers bloody, set gaze upon the sand. Bottle up complaints—though that part’s harder. They wake and walk and sleep, all on flat land and adrift, with only God for anchor.…
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It was early August. On that steamy Saturday night, which was slowly changing over to a Sunday morning, the temperature was still in the 90’s. Under the heat dome, there was no relief.
Kevin was smoking and pacing in front of the pizza place. He checked his watch and saw that it was ten till midnight. Kevin looked out at the street, but there was no sign of Wayne, who’d promised that this last run of the night would be really quick.
There was nothing Kevin could do, so he sat on the curb to finish his cigarette. He felt his anxiety building. He was anxious about when he would get done with work. Anxious about how much time he’d have at the bar before last call.…
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Todd Floss here. A quick note about my future. I plan to write a few fiction novels now that there is a huge need for them. I’m shooting for high six figures for the first one. Toby Vonnegut’s book Ass in the Chair: Writing Your First Blockbuster was a big help to my thinking, so I’m way ahead of the curve. I have sixty-eight ideas as of noon today. My plan is to print the ideas and tape them on my living room wall. In that way, they will be staring me down. I’ve dipped into some fiction novels recently and made a few artistic notes. I want bold colors on the cover, and I’m aiming for 250 pages, but I could go 400 if the “characters keep driving the plot.”…
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as a ship in a bottle
believing every wooden piece
a symbol of something
that can be shaped.
I see each fragile word nestled in your
lined fingers being carefully homed.
Eyes straining, focusing,
anything can be built despite
the small opening.
You laugh
when I tell you the ship
will never sail.
My words, random particles,
amass to nothing.…
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