Aug 25
The Wing Collector I sat beside him at the local bar We started talking about divorce and he asked me where I was in that process and I told him He said, I remember those feelings and then proceeded to show me pictures of insect wings that he’d collected since his divorce He explained each …
Aug 24
Save Yourself I cannot save you / I can’t even save myself. And so goes part of the chorus of Stabbing Westward’s 1998 song, “Save Yourself.” The industrial-metal band is okay as far as Nine Inch Nails wannabees go, but there’s something about that particular song that I find almost emotionally devastating. It’s about the …
Aug 16
The Screw City Poems by Richard Vargas (Roadside Press, 2025) Richard Vargas’s The Screw City Poems is a fierce, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest collection that captures the dissonant beauty of working-class life in America. With a voice that blends raw grit with lyrical sensitivity, Vargas delivers poems rooted in lived experience—poems that hum with the …
Aug 15
Becoming gods “Dear me, I think I’m becoming a god.” Emperor Vespasian just before shitting himself to death In Pompeii, you can see how the people became gods, empty spaces where life once was, near perfect molds of the imperfect. Last moments cast in ash, men and women scrambling for safety horrified at the idea …
Aug 14
i am a sucker for you babe So you are not against us you just want us to face the odds when we go septic then sing the body electric so theres great acoustics when you say you are not racist you say if they did it the right way it would be OK with …
Aug 13
I Would Sit With My Sister in a sterile room as nurses mixed her chemo cocktail. Treatment had assaulted her with side effects. Silently, I would pray—please. Oh how we talked our way through those hours while dreaming this magical potion would prevail, my eyes fixed on the silvery drip, drip, drip— hypnotized by the …
Aug 12
Liquor We were four hours into the graveyard shift, chroming lengths of polished cylindrical steel which would eventually be assembled into hydraulics for garbage trucks. It was important work to somebody, since the company was willing to pay us double our normal rates to work sixteen hours from Saturday night well into Sunday. It was …
Aug 11
Tim Murray (b. 1977) was conceived, born, raised, and resides in NWI.
Aug 10
I sure showed them When my card came up declined at a cookie place near my apartment I should have shrugged it off as not having enough money after taking care of the basic responsibilities of adult life Rent, bills, and groceries had all been paid so there wasn’t enough for fresh, overpriced cookies But …
Aug 09
The First Week at the Funeral Home I offer to carry her husband to the car. She accepts—the gray urn is heavier than anticipated. The weight of it reminds me of my son when he was latched to my hip. She asks if the urn will tip, and I reassure her that the top’s sealed, …
