In Conversation

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 …

The Missing Piece I feel like there’s a puzzle on the coffee table, and someone has suckered his friend into helping him move the tattered leather pull-out sofa to the street. He considered adding a sign that said free, but he figured setting it next to the street would imply as much. As they lift …

Rat Pack “You gotta love livin’, baby.” –Frank Sinatra “A squirrel is just a rat with a cuter outfit.” – Sarah Jessica Parker   “I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being–one of many ways–and knowing …

fight the good fight fuck ai, billionaires, flock cameras & mass surveillance, wall street traders, government intervention, big business, conservative strangleholds; i lament & cross post to facebook & insta & bluesky, youtube, snap, & tiktok to rally likeminded armchair revolutionaries. sent from my iphone on the nation’s largest mobile network Steve Maitlen resides in …

WATCHING FORREST GUMP WITH MY WIFE A week after she’s had major surgery and still needs pain pills which the doctors never provide enough of we distract ourselves with old movies, good and bad this one a mix of both then Forrest utters his famous line “Life was like a box of chocolates you never …

Iron Maiden’s Gonna Git Ya It was me, my three brothers, Pete, Steve and Alex, and my son who’d recently gladdened my liberal heart by adopting the urban moniker, Laz-E-Jay, all the male Koweskis left alive gathered on the grassy slope of Credit One amphitheater, what will always be known as Tinley Park to me, …

Little Town a little town in the middle of nowhere but everyone has to live somewhere right? I’ve been living here all of my life I never really thought about going anywhere else except maybe to Florida I think maybe it would be nice to retire to someplace warm maybe settle down in another little …

Shit Cloud The homeless guy at the base of King Street is huddled under a ratty sleeping bag. Has a portable heater under there to stay warm. He has shit himself and the fan from the heater blows a giant shit cloud towards the people standing at the nearby intersection waiting for the light. It …