January 15 2025Picture the ideal jungle gym,
made according to the designs
of an Ivy-League architect. He
spent his formative years on
campus, of brick, grass, and
clocktower, and late in his car-
eer was ask to design the ideal
jungle gym. Would you like to
play with me? Don’t laugh. I
hate it when you laugh, some-
times...
January 7 2025soilwashed deteriorated burgundy leather jacketcoat black knitlining sweater
striped longsleeved dressshirt
jockey underpants
thick woolen gray pants
socks
one pumpstyle leather shoe sidebuckle
rusted .32caliber pistol...
January 3 2025There are black clots in the corners of every room in the house, black clots of cluster flies. When I turn on the light they nest into my hair to find their shadows. They circle as a collapsed racehorse around the haloed ceiling. It is a white cylindrical room with no door. I watch as two figures ascend and descend from wires attached to the sky. One in red stripes, the other in black, sort of how bank robbers look in those old timey cartoons. They hurl themselves into curlicue flips, mail carriers in the thinning air. A flat stone sinks at their feet. The question itself is crowded out by memory. Just as soon up floats another...
December 31 2024On Friday night, I eat a sixty-three ounce bag of assorted chocolates while watching a mediocre action movie from the 1990s. For the next nine hours, my stomach roars like a silverback gorilla. While lying on the cold bathroom floor in agony, I swear I will never commit this horrific and indulgent transgression again. But two days later my sadness and hunger return with a vengeful fury, so I buy another sixty-three ounce bag of assorted chocolates. That night I throw the bag away without opening it...
December 17 2024There are sigils painted on the I5 southbound on-ramp. They were covered a month ago but you can still see the outlines, the curves. If you time it right, at that spot, before the flow of the commute, a single prayer can change the course of your life.
Sitting on the interstate, right in the thick of it, I can sense the heat death we are moving towards, collectively, and from my observations, enthusiastically. This is Americana, this is our nation distilled down to a few miles of porous asphalt. The single mother next to me, the Norwood four HVAC man next to her, we melt into one amid the rising heat waves of our vehicles...
December 9 2024You confessed that your second beer
was your third and I was only pocket
watching once I felt your hands needed
forgiveness so I drank too and laughed
about it before asking what he did that was
so awful...
December 2 2024A HUMAN, high on human drugs, has been working on a POEM for months. Another HUMAN, high on human drugs, passes him a swishing red bottle of wine that he chugs, as they dance in a tunnel where they zip in and out of space, small points on a collapsing and reconstructing grid.
The POEM includes words he typed into it frequently, words that formed into verses, the verses resembling a POEM within a POEM. The POEM within the POEM is the POEM of a character who is writing a POEM, which describes the POEM of a POET who is writing a POEM about his POEM...
November 27 2024I. desenllaç (denouement)
three olive flies fighting
for their trite, tiny fly lives,
struggling against the slick ice
cubes in a glass of crimson sangria.
affirmations: i attract abundance.
i attract change. i attract good health...
November 22 2024I watched as one girl danced even when they cut her music. I watched the girls on their knees, scraping the money into bags. I watched a boy in a Patagonia puffer jacket try to take a Snapchat video of one of the dancers.
Are you taking a video, asked the dancer.
The boy shook his head. A bouncer came over and shoved the phone out of the boy’s hands. The video, if there had been one, was gone...
November 15 2024I’d been back too long, doing all the things I used to do and living with a girl who’d spent the past year in the psyche ward for killing her family cat and trying to kill the dog.
She floated through this free fall, enamored with the mistakes she’d made, said, “God gives every person a little piece of His soul, so each person’s soul is already God’s, just this one grand soul, but God gets addicted to giving himself away then feels empty and wants some of it back. Eventually God’s going to feel empty all the time and call back most of His soul, and that’s what the apocalypse is all about...
November 13 2024Your favorite band just killed a guy
November 6 2024Mice in the freezer. Next to the ice cream. This month last year. So tightly packed into each other. Translucently spooning.
This month last year, too: when that hoodlum came to bleed right in front of my house.
Decomposition, psychiatric consumption, and how there wasn’t even a snake.
Not any longer...
October 21 2024I can guide you through the beats of this, it’s pretty simple.
First pretend you’re girl Hemingway in Bushwick. Take a sip of hot black coffee. Write the sun also rises in miniature, over and over again in small concentric circles, but do it without any war.
Here’s how it sounds. Short sentences interspersed with a few run-ons, integrating the traditional and the sensitive in fragmented pieces across your observations of modern everyday life...
October 7 2024I’m ten. We are at Momom and Popops’ house. Django and Luna are there. Me and Mom and Popop and Elias walk through East Rock Park. The dogs come with us. Luna loves to run. I think she could run forever. She jumps and she glides and she cuts and barks and she’s happy. I'm grinning. Elias and I help each other over the fallen tree. Django goes under it. Elias and I place bets on which dog will get home first. Elias bets on Django and always wins. Luna loves the dirt too much to ever win. I’m thirteen. I was wrong. Luna can’t run forever. We walk East Rock Park with only Django. Sometimes he stops moving and Popop yells...
October 2 2024Facts are bigger in the dark! If you lie on the floor very straight the temperature(s) of all the pulses in the world coarse right through you
Suddenly the distinction between a loon and a regular becomes much less important
Lying down means you can read and understand the loon book
Slipknots and silk and
a pistol auto 9 mm fashioned out of unimaginative heavy metals
Stainless steel starting more than it can finish...
September 27 2024I come alive when she says her mom is dead. I stare at the green wine in my glass long enough to bead my eyes, then I meet hers and hit her with the perfect line.
What is her name?
Like I said, the perfect line, erasing every other guy she’s ever been with. Oh, are you sorry to hear that? Are you so sorry for her loss? I want to know her name. Not what it was but is. That I rarely get to use it, though more often than you’d think, makes it ultra perfect...
September 23 2024My summer aspirational vibe is coming together quite nicely
on my Pinterest moodboard, but unfortunately I am running out of summer and running out of steam.
My summer aspirational vibe is
Lana Del Rey with cursive Nabokav Whitman tattoo
My summer aspirational vibe is
the Ginsberg and Bukowski in his bedroom, evidence of
an undergrad girl’s presence...
September 19 2024Everyone is three to ten years old but I’m the best at it. I think coyotes means grandma, I think coyotes are packs of grandmas that have grandkids that live out of state, so the coyotes that’s why,
that’s why
*turns to the infinite morphs of my little brother*
that’s why theyre in the backyard at night.
thas why i cant even fine bunny. Bunny gawn...
September 11 2024Every morning I drink water, from a glass jar, spiked with three spoonfuls of chia seeds. In bed, on the phone, soaking in the sunlight, my chia water spills on top of me. With my hands I spread the seeds thoroughly on my dress. With my hands. I leave my dress crumbled and wet on the edge of my bathroom sink. I won’t look at the dress for another day. When I do go back to clean the dress I will notice the seeds have sprouted little glowing roots. My heart is frozen. I will dampen my dress again, and shove it under the sink to the dim-lit corner...
September 9 2024I was the hottest guy in the office, and I burned it all to the ground.
Now already, if you know me, you’d be calling me a liar. “But Sam,” you’d say, “you’re bald, you’ve been smoking since you were 16 and avoiding sunblock. You’ve got beady eyes, flesh-bony protrusions on the forehead from raising and furrowing your brows so much in quizzical self-satisfaction, a fucking cleft lip and palate, a facial birth defect, for Christ sakes. Not only that, but you’re just impotently complaining and venting your power fantasies...”
September 5 2024i will keep pushing you until i have to go into witness protection. dark wooden furniture is better.
i wish there were panoramic screenshots. iridescent artificial fishing bait is just as enchanting to humans as it is to fish. you're an ashtray, i'm a machine. my love language is wearing a strip of masking tape around my wedding ring finger. i drink salt water in my room to feel closer to the ocean...