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Gas Money, Honey
Eastern Pennsylvanians love their hoagies. I’d pulled into a gas station after driving six hours north. The place advertised 2 for 1 liters of cola and state minimum cigarette prices. A ‘70s style goose sweeping across a setting sun illuminated above their door. Mosquitoes flocked to its luminance. I parked the car in the rear…
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Envy
I want your Kevlar skin evolutionarily engineered to banish the blades, the bullets, the bad omens. I want your ‘fuck the world’ attitude the known, flawed self unhindered by inevitable judgement no blood loss no bullshit no brown nose no nothing but grit and gums and safety pins because they owe you, and not the…
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Planes of You
Most of us do not remember the first time we learned our shapes. Until you budded into my life, I thought that I knew all the circles, squares, and rectangles – the rigidly defined personalities, those with a set number of sides, those who are predictable, parallel, familiar. I look back on the cast of…
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Ringtone (Killing Trevor Pt. 3)
Henry hadn’t set an alarm for a reason. That waking up to a machine nonsense was only a necessary means to an end. A crutch to maintain his place in the realm of responsible adulthood. That morning, he wanted to see how far his body could go naturally catching him up on the sleep his…
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Thirst (Killing Trevor Pt. 2)
She opened the door to the gas station half expecting the counter to be unmanned. Phillip, the greasy-haired attendant who worked the night shift, had a habit of stepping out the back to smoke a hand-rolled cigarette, leaving the counter empty. He’d stand within earshot of the bells that hung from the front door and…
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Headache (Killing Trevor Pt. 1)
The rain pounded on the metal roof of the car. It smattered against the glass. Filtered by those creeping droplets on the windows, the streetlight shadows animated the surfaces of the couple’s still faces. Cynthia, her thinly plucked eyebrows raised, looked at his hands as they gripped the steering wheel. A nervous tick of his,…
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A Line at Twin Rivers
I look up from my watch and hock a wad of phlegm into the mulch trying to seem more ticked off than I am because we’d been standing in line for forty-five endless minutes. I could have watched half a movie in this time. I keep thinking about and that thought makes me irritable. So…
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Pink Bow Untied
Rain would have been more fitting. Clouds. Torrential downpours. Some freak hurricane. Not this nurturing warmth that was carried in the breeze along with the songs of springtime robins. The boys were out with their father picking up new fishing poles and getting something for lunch. Patrick felt it best that Isabella, his wife, the…
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Top Score
Whenever I would get to see you, when it was our time, I felt I was stepping up to the challenge of an arcade pinball machine. Feeling below the cabinet for that hidden power switch, I’d seek you out. Reaching into my coat pocket for my busted burner phone and punching in the sequence of…
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Burning the Tracks
A red glow washed over the amorphous designs on the table. Thin, bent tubes housing neon bordered the metallic siding. She sat in the hollow space carved out by the fish tank wall wrapping behind their customary booth. He hadn’t answered her question, the question she had asked him her to pose. She knew he…
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The Only Three Hobos in Boulder
“Who are you?” “I am just a man.” The long-trunked, dark-skinned man who the gruff guy with anger in his eyes called Cisco pleaded for more of an explanation with childlike inquisitiveness in his glistening eyes. You know how when a kid’ll ask you something you know you shouldn’t tell them the real answer to,…
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A Plate for Pickles
There are many things Nancy does regularly. She looks out the window in her flat for hours on end. She sees people leave for their jobs in the morning. She sees them return to their homes in the evening. She cleans her flat every morning. She picks up the phone and has lengthy conversations. She…
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The Sieve Bored Holier
“I am the place in which something has occurred.” — Claude Lévi–Strauss What is here labelled as “something,” must be aggrandized. “Something” is too broad a descriptor. So, is it more direct to say I am the place in which many a thing has happened? Is this a better means of explaining in a single…
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An Evening Out in Fishtown, or the shabbily doctored-up bits of observation I typed into my phone on the evening of August 19, 2016.
Find no purpose here!—unless purpose can be distilled from the peculiarities of the sights and sounds of one man’s collection of lines taken down while pretending to send text messages during a summer evening out in an eclectic Philadelphia neighborhood. Frankfort Hall. Beer garden. Biergarten? I’ll settle on the former. This is a haven…
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Sophisticating the Rudimentary 