Archives

Sundown

By the time we recognize the aged faces of our oldest friends’ parents in their faces, we are ourselves old. The creases in their foreheads, the ginger steps of their thread-veined legs, the freckled humps of their upper backs, the deep lines down their forearms. These faces were unimagined to ever be our own, but […]

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Reason

Persistence wends its way through me, and dogged determination is my downfall – rendering me as emotionally aloof and socially distant as a rosy clan of Irishmen on Christmas Eve, before there’s been anything to drink – born of those same people who show up for a free dinner, but not the funeral of your […]

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Tree of Knowledge

Along this leaning tree overspreads a crooked arm, wan with tired views and news of reaching, forlorn and telling, assiduously bristled in barky intent and knowing. It always meant to branch out in a random shuffling of limbs its mistakes of revelation – no telling where they would lead. But wakeful indecisiveness, anchored by dreamy […]

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Opposites of Truth

Drawn up on my tongue like a syringe full of potassium – with so much thought and effort – is all the manufactured insouciance, spit back undeservedly into the air. The words are sucked back into self-imposed, semi-forgotten vacuity, committed only to my memory, where I carve them into the stone of what you don’t […]

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Opening Day

The shore’s greatest stretch is what they called it – the sport of kings – which I knew it wasn’t and took for bullshit. An excuse to be in the sun on a weekday afternoon an inch away from the beach in spectators, handicapping behind the paddock, is what it was. – Pick a horse […]

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The Slumber Party

On a Friday night in June, we rounded the corner past the elevators, floors thick with dented wax and walls thick with beige over blue over beige over blue. There’s a minor blaze to keep us on our toes, said a nurse whose edgy bucktoothed laughter guided her in step with an empty wheelchair. And […]

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I Have Created Myself

On the day the bird takes flight, all will be the same. A dreary, lint-colored felt will serve as a swath of sky, paring itself into small circles of blue dreams from which desperation will seep, then pour – and finally inundate beneath. But there will be no harbingers to precede or even tardily accompany […]

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