It was the night we were told we couldn’t pretend we were Catholic.
The priest turned only toward you and said, “It’s between you and God.”
And you cried.
I dream of her,
childish and illogical,
straight hair and tiger-eyes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about family. My family does not talk to me.
Growing up in a traditional mom-dad-sibling household, I would often struggle with my place in the familial set-up. I am the oldest of two, and the blackest of sheep. My upbringing was filled with an underlying current of panic, my parents not wanting me to grow up too fast, my spirit desiring to grow up as fast as possible, to get out.
A clipboard staked my claim on the counter nearest the nursing station. I poured myself a cup of coffee, whitened it with a packet of powder, and scanned the to-do list on the top page. Not so bad, I thought. My co-residents hadn’t signed out too much. As the intern on call, the forecast for my night now depended on who got admitted to the hospital, but I expected it to be quiet. Around Lake Erie an advisory of sleet mixed with snow got the streets salted and kept most folks inside and out of the ER. I drew little boxes next to the things that had to get done, intending to fill them in as I went along.
Mr. Butterchips is back for our June issue!
My punk-rock gothic-pixie little sister fourteen fresh faced
We listened to The Cure during art class Made bongs and pipes
out of ceramic You taught me how to kiss people who could
never love me
About ten years ago, I was wasting my life on a shitty horror movie website. It doesn’t exist anymore. Badly run in every conceivable fashion, I quit after deciding that they were never going to pay me the hundreds of dollars they owed me at that point. I put in a little over a year. The work itself was fine. Hell, it was usually a lot of fun. I wrote reviews for dozens of films, connected with a number of independent filmmakers and DVD release companies, and interviewed a ton of really great names. Despite the appalling mediocrity of the website itself, I conducted interviews, on behalf of the site, with the likes of George A. Romero, Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, Tony Todd, Sid Haig, Bill Mosely, and many others.
In the fall of 1976, we sixth graders were thrilled our Georgia Governor Carter had been elected President of the United States and that we’d celebrated the bicentennial of our country. Our community had come together for a parade with the high school marching band, the mayor in a convertible waiving, and our church youth singing the good news on a float pulled by our song director’s Ford F-150. The next day, Sunday morning, our twelve-year-old group of boys marched into the sanctuary of the Baptist church, sitting near the back, so we could pass notes, send spitball through straws to girls a few rows down, fart and laugh at ourselves.
Supermassive Black Hole swallowed your cackle-low
Cosmos whisper pretty Come here darling and you come
I hope I never forget that pack of middle-schoolers
at the playground near my house, how they acted
like middle-schoolers, shouting their conversations
across the neighborhood as if showing off new sneakers,
the boys doing mean things to the girls,
the girls saying mean things about each other.
“Are you willing to accept spiritual warfare?”
“Yes”
“Mental warfare?”
“Yes”
“Moral degradation?”
“Yes”
“Cognitive dissonance?”
“Yes”
“And finally, death?”
Tilted
head, right arm
behind the back, fingers
curled around the left arm’s inner
elbow
We all live on the Hudson, America’s only true river. It’s
a driveway, a landing strip, and a dead end. The Hudson is not the only river
to become a school, but it is the only one once beheld by the likes of George
Washington, Melville, and Sir Winston Churchill.
When the new principal
under the direction
of the educational
consulting company
asks you to train
your minimum-wage replacement
I am melting from realizing some
unfixable holes in this carton of dreams.
Someone carried down my teenage
ambitions in a sack and slung them
onto the floor.
The heat from the stove had warmed the small kitchen from inviting through cosy to where it sat now at uncomfortable. Abyan knew it wouldn’t be long before it became unbearable, but she had to finish all of the cooking before then anyway; their guests would arrive somewhere between uncomfortable and plain hot so the kitchen would be left to its final stages of heating up and cooling down again without her. She would be in the lounge room serving light refreshments of sambuus while Ramaas poured the hot, spiced tea by then. Her nerves made her impatient and she resisted the pointless urge to remove the lid from the cubed chicken and prod it into cooking faster.
“So how often are you reaching out to the guys in your recovery groups?,” my counselor asked me.
“Reaching out? Like actually talking to them or just being in group?”
“No, he said, “actually texting and calling other men to talk.”
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