– 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 […]
They came upon some bones in the forest. She saw them first in the shadows and thought they were ferns forcing up fiddleheads from a bed of leaves. But he saw them first for what they were, bones of a small creature. It looked like some carnivores had shared a meal. Hollows clawed from decaying leaves told a story of a tragic scene unseen. He was a police officer […]
Once, it was glorious — lithe, flowing, carnal, capricious. So effortless, moving with abandon and finding fault with hips and lips and hair and thighs now mourned. Watching through eyelid slits as charts become tomes of words and terms and treatments that are hard to bear, but for the alternative. Contemporaries arm themselves with creams and steams and fillers to smooth grin crinkles, instead of saline streambeds and […]
I am sick. Not the dying sick, but the perpetually sick, the we-can-help-you-manage-your-pain-but-we-can’t-cure-you sick. I need a lot of bloodwork and my phlebotomist calls me Momma. But I never felt that primal need some other women have, the urge to grow children inside and deliver them to the world. I am a Teacher, and a good one. I help dry tears and give advice and attend youth sporting […]
Boxed here, her room, fruit punch served as breakfast, no TV, bad reception, books on architecture, more on trees, runes, in dust. The mattress, as ever, unshaped to my skin, bones; and so the pain goes, comes in waves. Now the radio, its waves, long and lonely, and she and I in every note. Each point, the scan finds some instrument, some aria, far flung, from the far reaches […]
[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 […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 