In Conversation

Life is Fleeting, or, Fuck! It’s Feeling Like the End Times, Again I feel this sense of impending doom every time I accidentally watch the news; that we as a species have once again stumbled up on the cusp of self-annihilation. Ordinarily, I’m incredibly diligent when it comes to dodging reality, but when you share …

MOST WANTED When Bill was sent for a thirty-day evaluation at the psych hospital, after police found him siphoning anti-freeze from a pickup truck behind Tom’s Diner, his fiancé, Jessica, decided she had had enough. Though it wasn’t like their life together was anything close to perfect or normal. It wasn’t as if they were …

My Favourite Pizza Shop Has steel grates on the windows. Next door, the windows are fitted with plywood courtesy of the municipality. It used to be a convenience store operated by a first-generation Chinese Canadian whose store had no heat in winter just warm breath that lingered with his mocked, broken English as he laid …

That Night Visions of a long-ago night headed to Bukowski’s a time in life where anything seemed possible Blasting out Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby” and my brother and I singing along… “She’s probably somebody’s only light, gonna shine tonight” A tale of tortured young love that might never be but where you still held out …

SCAMPER Balcony, cigarette, whiskey. Brother’s inside the ward again, the grim voices inside his head again. There’s a letter I want to write to him to remedy all of this. I’ve even split with my girl— she’s dancing at her brother’s wedding as I’m trying to write a letter to mine but when he gets …

The new hire cook looked like a miniature, dollar store Frank Zappa, without the glint of warped genius in his eyes or his sense of humor, though inevitable, he would play a guitar in a bad heavy metal band. The only glint in his eyes I could see was a barely suppressed tendency towards crazy. …

I’ve known Karl Koweski, aka The Polish Hammer, since the early 2000s. I was first introduced to his writing through his column “Observations of a Dumb Polack” at Brian Fugett’s Zygote in my Coffee. Karl’s provocative, self-deprecating humor and big heart have kept me happily reading his work through Roadside Press and his column at …

Halfway to Heaven Well, Bippy the Chihuahua-Cornholing Clown who runs the show at Hydra Hydraulics has chased off every quality operator once employed here through an intense program of sixty-five-hour work weeks and aggressive ingratitude, leaving behind only a bumbling cadre of the desperately unskilled and/or the dumb Polacks. The Polish Hammer represented the and/or …

The Water Is Never Shallow Devon Fulford’s you can still drown in the shallows There are books of poems that invite admiration for their construction, and there are books less interested in being admired than in getting close enough to leave a bruise. Devon Fulford’s you can still drown in the shallows, published by Roadside …

Kakistocracy After school, on a Friday evening thistle-bound road, pebbles squeaking underfoot, we’d stop and yell down the empty well, curses and cackles and snatches of song. The words came back mangled, an alien language, the speech of the dead or at least, the buried. Crows mocked us. Their descendants mock us still, from the …