Mice
I need something else. something other than the static quiet. the heater is dead. the night frozen stiff outside, six below and dropping. I’m lying here in this wide-awake bedroom, grease from Las Iguanas still rolling in my stomach, a bad engine. refried beans burn a hole through the gut, sour and heavy. but worse
Frank’s on Milton Road
I shove the door open at this café on Milton Road, the handle all chewed up with rust bites and pits. the place reeks of burnt bacon and old grease, and it hits you in the gut, hard. “Coffee, black, eight sugars please.” I stare out the smeared window. across the street there’s a hardware
The Fence
it was a big bastard of a project, the first time I saw the house, the kind of dumb hope you buy when you still believe in forever. the front fence, cast iron, 1940s, rising off its brick columns, proud and solid, untouched by the rot that had taken everything else. I made the rust
Ladybird Long Stay Hotel
late in the season again — the way I’m late for everything that matters — and there they hang, those dead hydrangea heads, brown and crisp as paper lanterns left out in the rain, still clinging to stems that don’t give a damn, pushing out new blossoms anyway, pink and smug, like the world saying
The Talk Show Host
motorised chairs whine. plastic seats creak under old bones. fluorescent tubes hum low. steel poles rise above balding heads and thin hair. clear bags of saline drip slow, intravenous lines taped to blue-veined arms. they sit in rows, three deep, five across. care-home attendants move quiet between them. they wait for the talk show host.