Greedily he drank poison
forcing down into his blood, his cells, his vapor,
ugliness as sharp as a first crack of lightning
across an empty prairie.
Greedily he drank poison
forcing down into his blood, his cells, his vapor,
ugliness as sharp as a first crack of lightning
across an empty prairie.
The occasional stabs
and the faint
buzz in my belly
convince me that this
is completely normal.
you move like a planet
the curve of your limbs in orbit
against the cold combustion of space—
s everything word worthy?
Is a poem a manifest?
If you can see in the dark, can you still die?
If this is a light in the dark, will it bind you?
Will words wrapped around a crime end the crime forever?
Where does The Religion of (No)
Scarcity take us—
what do we look to,
from what do we look away.
Ashley, the other relief bartender at the Disco Duck, had told me not to worry, that she was an expert at the manifestation of cold, hard cash. “It’s called the dry hustle, honey,” she’d said in her saccharin drawl. “Dry because you never have to, you know, fuck ’em?”
Ring in the new year with your favorite of all the drunken monkeys - Alex Schumacher's Mr. Butterchips!
It suddenly occurred to Amy that the one person she wanted to talk to was the one person who remained elusive, hidden, actually, by the blacked-out glass of his Ram truck. The driver had not appeared. Between the tinted windows and the reflections off the glass, she couldn’t be sure who was in the truck or how many there might be.
They say scorpions
Are solitary
But really they are lovers
Dancing in darkness
to find their mate
By the side of the road, I screamed myself hoarse, pacing back and forth, unable to stop looking at the flattened car. I want to die, I want to die, I want to die, too, I kept saying.
A silver-haired woman with still-taut cheekbones smiles from the ad. A pitch for magic potions aimed at women with crow’s feet and creases. A woman like me, experienced in flutters of self-doubt and twinges of loss. Vulnerable to the seductive pull of junk science and sly text—serums with proven clinical strength, the latest in anti-wrinkle technology. Sweet-smelling fruit extracts to moisturize, rejuvenate, illuminate. Who doesn’t want to glow with renewed vitality?
Our naming the men reached its peak with the Prophet. The gist of the joke is this dirty little man walking quickly around town, always with his head turned slightly to the right, mumbling and gesturing to himself as he goes, is actually talking to God.
we feed
the economy. &, this kind of ejaculation
keeps us
checked. ‘Cause we’re so much worse other-
wise.
So when an entire gallery of mystical beasts,
purple toads and mountain boomers,
are made into Real Life and available to me,
now that I’m out of fresh episodes of nostalgia,
you have to know I’m going to lose it.
Boarded up, the windows are now
closed eyelids of the sleeping, and the silence
dressing this place hangs loosely
I aimed
my red pen & spoke,
You will not
get a thing for this ride!
I want to be clean. I want to be clean in the way that birds are when they molt, shedding their feathers to grow newer, brighter ones. A snake grinding against rough wood to slip itself out from its old skin, leaving it in its slithery path. A hermit crab, buried underneath the sand in the early morning, eating the exoskeleton that it sheds.
Gabriel Ricard looks back on the (screwed up) year that was 2017 and ahead to the (hopefully less screwed up) year that will be in 2018, in his latest Captain Canada column.
Featuring: Amarcord (1973); Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces (2014); Fantastic Planet (1973); Thor: Ragnarok (2017); Justice League (2017)
There’s the “windsor knot.” That silent addict—on time for his (breakfast, lunch, dinner) release. For the ritual that screws him into his dry clean shirt, afterwards. He has trimmed. He has yanked on his beveled black sock.
He’d been dead for thirty years,
but I’ll play Scrabble with anyone.