Jul 03
When the Pleasure Palace Shut Down for Repairs When the pleasure palace shut down for repairs there was nowhere to go, there was work, but no one wanted to go there, with that stupid nametag with your prison picture, not that you’d been to prison, but now you knew what you’d look like if you …
Jun 15
Nothing Else To Do On A Tuesday Night Got into the mushrooms again. Now, the flowers on the wallpaper are spinning. Like tiny galaxies to a pulse. As I sit on the toilet, crouched over in mesmerized hunch. Floating back from absentia like a trusted airman making for home. Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author …
Jun 07
Babies from a Candy I am sitting around listening to the blues with my wife. Both very drunk. When I tell her that something would be like taking babies from a candy. She pauses for a moment, then corrects me. “I thought I could let it go,” she smiles. “But I just can’t.” We both …
May 30
Diminishing Way It was never a cleansing rain, the mammoth clouds brought to dark extinctions, nothing breathed back into a former life, just wet against bone, really: eating through threadbare layers, awake with the dumpster diving coons, a concealed blade for when the shrill of the world came shrieking, the cap of the bottle loosened …
Feb 09
Satan’s Choice Drug Run We are driving through Blind River, on our way back from camp. Past the dragon boat races and that half-demented dentist who should have stopped pulling teeth over a decade ago. And looking to the nearest corner of the Tim Hortons parking lot, my wife and I both see them right …
Nov 14
Clods of Mead for the Ancient Mind The world is a small place if you crawl back into the womb. When I hold my hands out, it is with a moderate disbelief more than faith. Dirty dish water after the dinner hour rush. Clods of mead for the ancient mind. Movie theatres let out into …
Jun 23
Suicide, By Cop We are on our way to the trailer. 2/3rds the way down the 108 when a line of cop cars seal off the highway in both directions. Start putting on their bulletproof vests and speaking into a megaphone to this old blue pickup that has parked itself in the middle of the …
May 15
What’s In Your Coffee? (for Brian Fugett) The Ohio River is bursting at the banks. Joe Burrow hits a streaking barn burner across the middle. I pass this woman drinking in a parking lot, dressing down a happy face painted on a building across the street. And the question arises, as if from the cackling …
Apr 12
Potato Man I am descended from a long line of Irish peasants, potato farmers to be more exact, working the land for English plantation owners. One peasant hooked up with the master’s daughter, the master giving his daughter an ultimatum. She chose the Irish peasant, and they were both banished to the new world. And …
Mar 15
Motor Oil Through the Lemonade There is motor oil through the lemonade, razor invasion piranhas enter my field of vision, the floodlight metropolis and payola queens atop the charts – Francis Bacon spectres streaking down a treacherous canvas, that red-eyed seagull flock of swarm. Two rings of twine for a tail-eaten snake. There are craters …
