At the coffee shop, all the tables are full, both the rectangular tables and the smaller square ones. People fill each side, hunched over computers and stacks of notes. There are boyfriends and girlfriends in turd-colored hoodies and skimpy white tank-tops, parents and children dissecting fractions and Abraham Lincoln, laughter, hugs, shoving, F-bombs deployed with cheer, fusillades of life fired into my ears.
Continue reading “Empty Histories by Yash Seyedbagheri”
There was a dog on the road. A mangy thing with grey fur falling out in tufts showing its wrecked body. I saw him one night limping up the road as I smoked my cigarette and did nothing. I watched it limp towards the side of the road snout burrowing deep into the dewy grass looking for anything to eat. He found the mouse whose body I had thrown there earlier in the day. I didn’t kill the mouse. Something else did. The mangy thing found the mouse and eyed it suspiciously for a moment, natural suspicion overriding starvation for an instant, and then ate the mouse. The mangy thing limped away just as I finished my cigarette and went inside.
Continue reading “Dying Things by Yancarlo”
I caught her eye. Recognised a kindred spirit. Her head then converted into cruor popcorn. Colour of grey nail varnish, millet porridge. Scarlet white and woeful.
I feared I’d lose my lonesome bench for good.
Continue reading “All My Darlings Waiting by Antony Osgood”
Friday night, Nick cranks up his Spotify playlist, a plethora of Tchaikovsky. The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Eugene Onegin.
He’s home on Friday, he’s twenty-six, but he can party.
Continue reading “I Love You, Man by Yash Seyedhagheri”
Mom costs me friends. She shows up drunk to my high school functions. Double-fists Merlot at a parent teacher conference. And it happens again at my drama club production of Hamlet, set in a Burger King. Although this time she imbibes Pinot.
Friends’ parents suggest I’m not good company. It’s not me, they claim. They just have to be selective. This is high school, it’s a volatile time for everyone. People are easily influenced.
Continue reading “Friend Request by Yash Seyedbagheri”
Jonathan was out on his front porch swing, engrossed in another vampire book, when he gave a shiver and, looking up, caught his neighbor’s dark eye. Willy was across the street, standing on his own front porch. ‘Okay if I come over?’ he called apologetically.
Chris leaned his head against the bus window. He was tired but he couldn’t let himself even doze as that would turn into deep, much-needed sleep.
To this dying man whom the wolf already scents
And whom the crow watches.
Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil
Hobie Barkley was a first-riser most of his life, and once he was of exploring age, able to go on his own, he toured the mountain like it was newly presented to him, a gift from the God of Mountains. Nobody in the Greater Hills Region of Colorado knew it any better than him. Even some of the old prospectors, their habits and labors cut way back by age, infirmity or a newly-found woman, did not rise to his habits.
I’m rolling my head back and forth back and forth for hours at a time, sometimes against the wall, sometimes along the bed. I regard my first morning view, freezing ice frost patterns on the inside of my single window. Then it’s back to blankets awhile and rolling my head. To be free you must connect with people, withdrawing with my rocking is disappearance in my trance. But it is also liberation. I conjure up visions from the pace. My intent: to take the randomness of life and organize it, to picture by motion daily happenings and rhythm out a purpose. I spin through a back and forth reverie sweep of prairie sky, the colour and thought of the blue turning in my mind, imagine the bridge over the South Saskatchewan river, take that bridge to wilderness, to antelope leaping over the Great Sand Hills. I have $42.39. I’m 24 years old. I have a college degree. I lie on my bed and rock.
Continue reading “Rocking In The Meaning (of the World) by Harrison Kim”
literally stories 