reinventing rogue realities since 1994.

I don’t know which came first: lack of sleep or me sneaking to the computer to log in and see your green dot in the wee hours of the morning, seeming to admit that you too had eyes wide open and mind still drumming like mine refusing to hush, quiet down enough for the nightly wipe down of mental dust. I buzzed you and you buzzed back—that’s just how we used to say hello and how are you and why…

When I was twenty-six I found out the guy who sat behind me in senior year of high school died. I had known him for almost nine years when I heard the news, and I could not believe it no matter how many times our friends posted about it. We met on that first day, and I did not think much of him—he seemed proud and strong and willing to take someone in a fight. He was not the kind of person I…

I was eleven when I first felt the urge to die. I think it was in the middle of math class when I was suddenly overwhelmed by a deep grief I did not yet have the words to describe. The word helpwas foremost in my mind, and I could not pinpoint the exact circumstance I needed help with, much less a reasonable way to resolve it. So I took the pen on my desk, unscrewed the plastic casing, popped the…

Another dream of falling teeth: this time, they said, would be a mercy. In my sleep, dreaming of the blood that ran before me, not conscious it would run out with me. My next dream will be of the past, they showed me their faces: most strange and familiar. I know of them, but they have not met me yet. With one I share a frown, dimples in the same spots just below our cheeks. Another, a bump on…

Sometimes my tongue slips on the idea of this feeling for you. I try to find the words to sincerity. I try to sound— the way sounding is penetration, a technicality of omission: I will not write aubades for you from the apartment door. The only poem you ever wanted from me, a sonnet that the Bard would writhe to. I will not write the words I can never speak out loud to you, much less repeat them with…

The myocytes of my larynx are the first to succumb to atrophy. I hear myself falter into hoarseness, eventual silence. I can breathe, but the whistle in my ears has reduced its pitch to barely above the hum of my breathing. My digits arching into claws: trying desperately to remember anything they honce were, yearning to compensate for the absence of pen on paper, of their strokes on key.

The…

There was no warning for the storm: the skies rained acid for what seemed to be the blink of a week, leaving behind a crack in the ground. Saline trickled in, filling the divide and splitting the continents. Continental drift meant that I had to choose where I would go, but you mouthed across the now-sea: not here, not here.

The green near the water faded into the orange sands burnt by a…

In the heat that clings to skin of the days I have decided to replace choking on endrying ash with the sensation of drowning in my own spit. It has proven marginally more effective at keeping this summer in its place.

The restaurant we ate at closed down. You know the one: glass facade with a fluorescent light hiding behind translucent red plastic. We sat at the far end, remember, talking about the state of the words that we were losing: syllable by syllable crawling from our throats over the smell of fried chicken and the lingering taste of sweet tea. The street vendor outside no longer remembers how many…

As a teenager, I had difficulty picturing where I would be or what I would be doing past the age of twenty-four. It seemed, at the time, that I could live only up to that age and then just disappear. I think maybe I lived through my early twenties in a state of constant dread. Of what, precisely? I was never so sure.

The dread used to enshroud my sense of time, keeping me from planning for the…

In the beginning was apprehension: the seven questions, most left unanswered. I give you my number anyway. You ring me seven weeks after the bar. You ask if I’m visiting again. My response was not certain, but you were.

The second movement is erratic: I don’t know yet how I want to be around you. I don’t know yet where the lines are so we make up the rules as we make up the games. The object: to…

When it comes to my emotional state, my mind has come to rationalize the semblance of a pattern of it. There are certain things I have come to expect: the general cheeriness, the intermittent despair, and maybe an outburst or two in a regular day. The pattern in the long-term includes a meltdown every few months. At this point, I may be a few months overdue for the next one.

Lately, the smallest…

“Mommy, who’s that?”

Her daughter’s finger was obscuring the face of one of her peers in the class picture—someone with familiar ears. She gently pushed her daughter’s finger aside to reveal a past friend, letting out air in a half-sigh, half-laugh.

“She was my lab partner,” she said simply, “I did okay, but she was the reason why our science teacher gave us hard assignments.”

Her daughter tilted…

The convenience store just around the corner calls: its sunlight- white fluorescent bulbs alluding to apocalypses in movies. (Maybe the end is near, but I’m just dropping by to buy what I need and go.)

Off to the side, a familiar face: smiling at nothing in particular. (They do that, promote these things as if convenience makes me happy.) Celebrities don’t have time to smile at customers. The…

Call it whatever you want to: it’s still just a spade. (With blood- stains and the faint wafting scent of sick.) There is nothing out of place here.

Why are you crying? The worst is over: now we cannot hear the sound of sirens wailing past.

The lights in the pub dull under the influence of sixty- proof water. Vision blurs into post-impressionist whorls of stupor. This is how, it turns out that the morning arrives: vague despite the clarity englassed.

In the morning the street wakes up hungover. The drinks from the night before mingle with lumps of forgotten dinner and flecks of pulutan tossed in acid just off the sidewalks. Stray travelers and first-time residents punctuate the facades of closed establishments, either asleep or needing to be. In an alley between buildings, someone is smoking their last cigarette of the night while waiting for…