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
ASSIMILATION by T. R. Hummer
Even his fingerprints vanished. His skin smoothed like river stone; his grip on the world diminished. He was sliding someplace frictionless. * Lovers had become landscape–the woman he knew that ancient summer was lost in a hedgerow, flowering, leaving, framing what could be seen. * What he touched penetrated skin and clung, but he did […]
The Future of America by Neil Carpathios
The Future of America has big biceps. He wears tight shirts to show them off. He saves his money to buy steroids to keep them big. This matters. He wants people to stare at his arms. He is a he, when he’s not a she. When he’s a she, she cracks her gum and pads […]
A Conversation with Quan Barry
by Nathan Winer
“There’s a… freedom allowed you in poetry. And I trust that, even if I can’t explain it. It bleeds into my fiction, in many ways.”
