Bluezbreakr

    The only thing colder than the stiff welcome of a wooden pew on your first Saturday mass in three years is walking out to the chapel steps mid-prayer to answer a phone call from the weekend’s charge nurse. “Alicia, you’re needed in the E.D. stat. Craziest night we’ve seen since October.”  The stucco churchfront was embalmed by the pearlescence of a full moon, but Alicia forsook its preservation for the sake of others who, she figured, probably needed more mercy than she did right now.            Few folks on the sidewalk tonight, Alicia thought, from the interior of a not-quite-new 4Runner. Too cold to foot

The last time I saw Mr. Winston, he'd been sitting across from me at the table during Sunday lunch, wrinkles and callouses rippling with pink like cuts of his barbecued pork. Today, I can't distinguish either of us from the stark white lining of his casket. When my dad woke me the day of the death with nothing but a knock at my door, I discovered that waking up to the news of a murder is barely waking at all. The news brings no upward jolt--no press against the jowls of pre-dawn like a bolt away from a spreading terror-dream. “Oh,” I rasped, blank, before sliding jeans on to go straddle the pink sky-tones braising the day

The only thing a vagrant wants to erode more than himself is other vagrants. Anyone who writes beautifully thinks ugly, ugly thoughts. Don't ask me how I know because i can't. This is law. My gums are decoupaged with clippings of Eliot books and transatlantic journals I've spent a decade matting. They only flake when I lick my lips or flick my tongue from my hard pallate to summon lahs aloud: Law law law. This week I've traveled the Cape with a recovering lawyer who taught me self-defense is impossible when you still testify in drawls thick as the guffaws from harbor geese; we both spew shit from different ends and leave portions of our

A darkness this crisp is enough to break a man used to cicadas croaking till the light poles shut off at 4am, but I could grow fond of flyovers from BOS. My first flight taught me that airplane engines don't hum--impatient fathers and aunts do. Air doesn't flow into the cabin faster than innocence and echoes flow out. You'll get rumbles when the wheels lower, but else, airplanes only shake as much as the steps taken down from the cabin. But you'll only ever leave one cabin. I've been breaking apart strolls through North End with texts to girls 1200 miles away, combined. I've got thoughts just as distant and as speckled and specular a

Every taste is acquired. Don’t be surprised when you too turn out to be the same. but you’re inimitable, like the galaxies of dust, decentrated, in every mushroom spore. Thank you: no amount of sweetness could ever mask you. Every moment’s turn is a glance into the universe at work. Taste her curves like honey dripping from the spoon.

For some reason, I decided Smashing Pumpkins' "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" would be a fitting last album of my last summer. But nothing shakes me anymore except "1979" which has slithered into the last ventricle of my mind aching to be 16 one more moment. My brother aches for any age otherwise; 16 and seized in misery, a paralytic agent regionalized to the larynx. I never miss the silence, but he's never had silence to miss—none all his own. Autism is noise, all textbooks read (in immediately previous editions, at least): static and mismanaged feedback, native to someone still learning to speak. And in the absenc

Damnit, Bryn, I think I’m too old again for these endless Socratisms on the virtues of how How your 1am phonecalls about how to care for felines with polydactyly end with footnotes on how not to care for yourself when you’re all you wish you loved. How screen doors offer the most resistance at 5am and screech like the crickets they shield against, who break the tensed surfaces of the nightnoise with slurred chirps of “How? How? How?” How the only other inhabitant of my back deck this morning has 8 legs suspended a foot above the floorboards and my first reaction is to step backward with the only 2 I’ve got.

we may have met trading borrowed time for stases we could’t sustain. I don’t remember how quick we were to toss aside dust jackets and record sleeves– nothing more than icons for a religion named “proof of purchase.” I still see its prodigal smudges in the ravines across my palm. to think: the same discontent that births all artists, plucks most back from the ashes they’ve nested in. we live and die voided; old tunnels marked for demolition (time is a flat circle; a stove eye melting us in sections) yet I can’t bring myself to crumble, even if you can’t recall which of the Carolinas bogs be

      Rorschach blots fickle tears onto diner napkins. he can’t seem to bleach out the tessellated piss stains on his jeans: this one is a dog, that one is every drip of vision he could never catch at second glance                           the patio umbrellas float like gondolas in the beerbuzzing phosphorescence; the taverns emptied hours ago and nobody paddled home. they’re too awake, half-drowned from the undulating ink                                 he scrubs his legs with wet paper, scrunched in the toilet where he and Freud met to lock moth’s wings to butterfly lips; behind each other’s backs they

When days take root in monochrome disdain, that rusty glaze, in lieu of life or light, returns to rot my ashen frame, and I am spurned as if a candle on a shelf to wither wher or not my wick wisps flame-- my cotton crown to weather down my self. My purpose pales in moments of disuse: were I not wove and waxed to burn and blush? Yet still I sit, unlit, on books and muse to anchor down these words I cannot touch. Wanly warm on my worn winter holder, ablaze or bare, I was birthed to smolder.