[part of The Fixer series] I’ll come through later, sweep the scene clean. You’ll be safe in South America by the time they sound the alarm. That’s the professional service ethic to expect when you hire the Quicker Picker Upper. It’s the forest primeval out there. Society’s reverting to a brutal state of nature. So find your fortune, cash out, set up in a country that is skeptical […]
in my dream i am back at les bulot cautiously trawling the fish soup afraid of probing its depths and finding myself hopelessly out of my comfort zone wishing i had opted for the sirloin steak which you are now pushing around your plate with the silver cutlery making blood and cream and the lissom pomme-frite mingle sensually on the bone china plate and now you are laughing at me […]
I kissed you too much that morning. Or it could’ve been too often. I don’t know which it was. I’m just sorry. I’ll blame the returning sun, the way it had silently purged the dark night of darkness, and the drunken streets of drunkenness, and shown me with its straight face that not even within an eternity could I ever kiss you enough, never quite capture something enduring of you […]
Because you did not encircle me completely, even though I would have let you, wanted you to, I still retain my own image of myself, albeit one ringed with a halo of ragged scars where we joined. And it is no surprise to hear you tell me, “I have a hole in my soul, where you have been.” Robert Ford lives on the east coast of Scotland, and writes […]
You notice the deep shovels of his hands are a combed-beach collection of scratches, the knuckles all wrecked, and still raw as lies. Black flecks like question marks on a map, sunken into the skin; you assume them to be thorns, but brambles rather than roses. From beneath the frayed cuffs of a cheap, over-worn shirt, the unruly wire of bronze hair emerging, and the first inch of a louder […]
creeping over concrete trails to the clink of phantom draughts – the shadow of red velvet nights staining my teeth and throat the altar of empty bottles—tributes to the blur and stretch of a girl whose name I will forget to the assurance that death is a lie to the knife-edge brightness of Orion to waking up, to minute-stopping throbs ticking down the day against the walls, my skull; a […]
The sun lowered itself into our six o’clock armchair, blushing cream walls to the tune of Dionysus’s blood, your faith between my ribs chanting thanks to God for the static under fingernails and when the same sun has gone tortoise-slow and quiet through the ground beneath us the breeze that didn’t blow today transforms a moonless night into myth—a remark thrown into shape: it’s summer, these things happen I know […]
In the southwest corner of my college campus stands a replica of Winged Victory, a classical Greek statue with two enormous wings spread perpendicular to her spine. There is nothing above her shoulders but the hint of a neck and the exact position of her upper extremities is left to the imagination. According to the oft-repeated tale, if a virgin ever graduated Winged Victory would sprout a head and arms […]
Pinned on the sports & metro, my thumbs smudged ink against newsprint. I thought about a trip we took: on the ride, I told you I loved how your thigh reddens when I squeeze it lightly, and how my own can’t; you said the other passengers made you nervous. We were on the way to meet your parents. Potholes thumped through the bus like kicked bass pedals. Sun dissolved the […]
when I was told, but it most likely was the same year security would trail behind me like dragged wagons through stores. Possibly, it was when my mother’s boyfriend, with his breath like yeast and hops, decided to define the word nigger for me. I stared off into the lamp in the corner and watched light seep through prisms in the shade. It might have been the year when loose […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 