I can’t remember why “boomerang” brings me so painfully into my own sights. The medicine has stopped nothing, nor was it intended to. These twin jars of split peas, I boil them for days. They will not soften, as I do. I try to work up the nerve to listen to some music. Is it so wrong to end a sentence with a pronoun? I haven’t licked a stamp for years, not with this tongue. You have to run to taste the wind, says my dog from his leash, says my friend from Orofino, to his. Chase the grass, then, in the wind down a long hill. Suffering is not, as it turns, its own schadenfreude. My friend stayed wrong about that. My stomach: still tender where she shot it, though I did not feel anything at the time. I felt nothing. It was quicker than the fall of an eyelash. The beauty berry bushes have spread, and their day-glo fruit hangs in bends throughout the forest. Words that matter can’t be words.
Further Reading
SELF-PORTRAIT IN A POWDERED WIG by Ray De Angelo Harris Sr.
I dress up a lot as a Smurf or Pirate, but right now, I see two elements in wigs: tradition and the perspective required to write soliloquies on hookers, to call class “work-eth shop” and ride up in a horse and robe, with my collar alive in the wind, ruffling the white curls that adorn […]
Driving Through Alabama
by Katherine Riegel
Spring has dropped purples and yellows like someone with so much abundance they’re careless of loss. Hot pink azalea bushes crouch round across lawns and I dream they wander, peaceful as cows but wiser. I’m not from here, but even I know the movies get it wrong. No, I don’t believe everyone who voted […]
STATE OF THE UNION
by Michael Meyerhofer
All the news is talking about the lack of surgical masks and ice cream trucks for the dead, how many grandfathers need help to breathe, but today, I can’t seem to stop wondering how oranges smell when they’re burning. For that, too, is something I’ve never known, having missed my one chance to walk a […]
