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His turban wrapped head bent over the newly lit crimson candle, a tear breaking his serene visage. His eyes opened and flashed to the newspaper heading next to him. “For my Alai.” His breath caught as the candle exploded; the dynamite that his son had been executed for not employing.

He started out as a careful, quiet boy, never in trouble, reading Tolstoy and listening to Tchaikovsky. Then she came along with pierced lips and pink hair, a drug problem and an attitude. It wasn’t a funeral I was expecting to attend.

“How may I help you, ma’am?” He was all courtesy, something she didn’t expect. His overalls showed signs of struggles with gardening shears, a clumsily sewed patch on his left breast pocket ripped at the seam. His arms were a rainless summer, caked with unyielding dirt and mud. Her eyes scanned down to his weathered boots, and in comparison his arms were polished ivory. “Ma’am?” She burst from her roving thoughts. Her lips, garnished with perfectly applied Chanel #4, unpursed as her manicured, moisturized hand crept from the tip of her sunglasses to the familiar place on her hip where it spent a surprisin

You see, people are generally associated with things they’re good at. Kenneth Browning was the best long-ranged shooter six counties up. Jeanette Locke could crochet the dickens out of any old piece of white yarn she found lying around. But Harry, what everyone knew about Harry was that he didn’t sing no more. Pinkerton ain’t really the singing type of environment, I guess. The sky’s all suffocated with smog over from The City, don’t forget to mention the oil rigs they got back five miles out where men come in white and dry and out black and slick as the devil’s tongue. But that didn’t stop the occasional f

It was during the second year of our marriage that I realised my wife was a large monitor lizard.  It was one of those funny little revelations that creeps up on one over time. I think the first clue came when she decided to hibernate for the three winter months. At first it did not arouse my suspicions. After all I myself enjoyed a lie-in, and had once slept in three whole hours past the alarm - on a weekday! - so I did not think it particularly note-worthy when she tucked herself in at the start of December and remained there until late February. Still, it aroused in me some small seed of doubt - for I had never before known her to go eve

Eagle, see him rising higher, borne aloft, on ice-tipped wings, born aloft, above carriages and kings. Warrior feathered, his swift flight is to the death of creatures too dull or slow to conceal their hides when his floating shadow is cast against the clouds. Talons of keratin re-issued hourly, he has no   need for knives—he tears hot death from flesh with silent grace. Far removed from lairs and the musty embrace of soil, nothing can touch or challenge him: he keeps his own ethics, seizes the wilderness with his shriek. Clear-eyed, he sees at once all features of the pancake land and its denizens, ho

You said, “write me a letter sometime,” and I smiled and nodded like it just made my top ten list of things to do today. I was lying because I knew if I ever wrote you a letter it would be uncertain stains all over the page and crumpled corners and scribbles in the very center of the paper that read Please Fix Me. I got out my calligraphy pens that night, but could find no words except those running under my skin, catching in my capillaries sickle-style. My vocabulary was hiding in my ventricles, trapped in caverns below my ribs. I had nothing but lies to sing to you, and and my only truths are silently screaming attention-whore

I. If this were a cliché, A poem, or both It would be about sparkling midnight skies and heartbeats and flowers and sex. There would be oceanic eyes and rain that tastes like tears. We’ll throw in anxiety-riddled murmurs and metaphorical bullets and allusions to sharp objects for pity. This is not a cliché anymore. So instead I wrote about the flavor of emerald and the fragrance of April hope. I painted pictures of a perfect pencil, poised over a blank page. II. If this were a romance, A message in a bottle, or both It would still be cliché, to capture electric fingers and longings locked away with skeleton keys