It’s been a while since I’ve talked to the clown with the framed degree. I can feel the same tremors roar their way home again. The volcano smirks and I can’t keep it down anymore; it bubbles in my pulse with a red froth. Dad has taken the blue road again; I can see him walking with his hands in his pockets. Away. Where the daughters are sane and the wives […]
While painting a house in New Orleans some twelve-thousand years ago, the owner came out and started talking to me— had me to sit down, take a break, drink some water. Offered me a cigarette—all nice and friendly in the easy southern heat. One thing led to another when, from nowhere, he revealed his daughter had died in the Jonestown Massacre and he was suddenly weeping, choking, sobbing over his […]
– Lea Deschenes Whatever’s developing is likely to remain sealed below the skin’s great projection screen until it’s finally done marinating in chemicals that will either decipher it as the amazing answer to a litany of unasked questions or expose it as yet another reminder of that time I jackknifed the tractor while backing-up a load of hay and sliced the tubeless tire […]
an eyelid twitch, a nervous cough become longing tells his Wild Bill eyes smoothed into blandness an old habit learned and worn between fat moments when everything moves too fast for any but the narrowest openings a wilderness he lived in with a few other solitary hostiles shooting at trespassers as would-be settlers his sleepy look fooled even some who knew better by now each player was […]
For Nicole I felt like I was in the morgue, counting bodies when I heard the doctors say, “Poor thing, she’s in a coma.” I had been doing aerial spins, loops, dives over and around my hospital bed. Hara-kiri didn’t work. I’d tried to swing on a butcher’s hook. And before that I lay down in a frosty white gown in a funeral home anticipating embalmment. No luck. […]
You were the footnote to afternoons in high summer and I thought of you as a limp breeze bumped sponges of air through the window screen, coating my skin with heat. You were the asterisk to my youth (*deceased), whispered asides, never direct conversations (*they’re too young to understand). I wrote you a letter on an old computer in DOS, as if eight years hadn’t passed since we sat in […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 