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 … More Pink Bow Untied
All day it had been the same thing. Jimmy Larson with his alpha-male-entitlement-because-a-growth-spurt-hit-before-these-other-two-soon-to-be-ninth-graders-so-I’ll-be-a-raging-douche-all-day-long attitude. So what if he got a hand job at the Martin’s bonfire the weekend of the Fourth? Six months ago, none of them even knew what a hand job was. All damn day. Every other blast fired from his loose cannon … More 2-2 Count
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 … More Top Score
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 … More Burning the Tracks
“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, … More The Only Three Hobos in Boulder
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 … More A Plate for Pickles
“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 … More The Sieve Bored Holier
“Good morning!” appears atop of the stream, a foolhardy greeting for a pile of memes posted by parrots petering political puff to make our mouths smile or cause them to huff. Oblivious addicts, under-the-bridge trolls, we stretch out our fingers for our morning scrolls.
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 or at a urinal during a summer evening out in an eclectic Philadelphia neighborhood. Frankfort Hall. Beer garden. Biergarten? I’ll settle on the former. … More 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.
I once cracked open a diving stick and emptied the sand from it for no good reason. I walk past the fence of the public pool and am hit with a burning sensation within the caverns of my nostrils from the day I first jumped into deep water without holding my nose. Instinct exhales the … More Diving Sticks and Other Recollections of Public Pools
