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
The Friend Seekers
by Siamak Vossoughi
This story was nominated for The Best of the Net. The boy and the girl were watching the father working in the backyard. It was Saturday afternoon and the sky was gray in a way that seemed like Saturday afternoon was always going to be gray from here on out. The girl was to go […]
RIVER OF WOMEN by Tao Aimin
Return to table of contents for PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010
The Overture
by J.D. Isip
Straight Guy tells me, “Gay men have it so easy – It’s all just fucking and see you later, pal Am I right?” And I’m of the Larry Kramer school of, “Yeah that’s about right” (and God knows some fag is calling the ACLU right now) He buys us more beer, “I mean, none of this […]
