One morning we woke to find the citycomposed entirely of glass, prismaticin the low sun glancing off sharp edges.Not one object remained that had not bledits colour into the ground in the night.From the deep shock-proof shells of officesto the etched headlines on delicate sheetsof stacked papers, everything was washed clear.Only the pavements, foundations and…
Category: Poetry
Fifteen
My bedroom is full of ghosts and glow in the dark stars I glued to the ceiling when I was fifteenand in sort-of love with a girl who smiled a mouth full of metal,the brackets of her braces alternatingher favourite colours: pink purple pink purple pink purple. I exhaled perfect O’s with a cigarette I…
A Thousand Dead Blackbirds Fall from the Sky
They say it might have been lightning, maybe hail. It might have been fireworkson New Year’s Eve, drunken truckers boot-snuffing the smouldering matches.Somehow, they all died. A quick airborne heart-stop–engines turned off. Wind plucked feathers from wings twisting maniacally, marionettes cut loose from their strings–some skyward cemetery gutted open, raining onto cars, small thuds on…
Torque
A dishevelled man placed his palmon my son’s head and said“Hello, Mason.”We were on the number 8 bus.We had never seen this man before.The sky was the exact greyof the seats we were sitting on. My son looked up at meand I could see a white-hot wireglowing behind his eyes.I said “He must have heard…
Silencer
He put a tube in her mouth like a cork to silence her. Down the hall, it only sounded like a little pop each time he murdered her. Trigger, hammer, bullet and like magic no sound came out. She took it out one night, her child hands grappling with his deadliness, and her parents watched…
Incident Reports: The Vanishing
Case File: No. 1 My husband was washing dishes,his hands in those yellow rubber gloves,the water running, a hum.I looked up to a sink full of soap,limp gloves on tiles. * Case File: No. 2 I scoured the woods on my ownafter 9-1-1 was reduced to a busy signal.Kept checking under the same log.Your shovel,…
An Hour, Maybe Two
It’s coming, hurting things along the way. It throttled Mrs Lanford’s self-esteem,and left her lodger, Nigel, with tortured thoughts.Mr Kumar’s dreams suddenly turned sourand he closed his shop. Rumour is he’s torched it but I’m too afraid to look. My next door neighbour, Sharon, killed her cat;my own stays out of reach. They warned us,…
I Knew by the Shapes of the Trees
I knew by the shapes of the trees we were almost home. I wasn’t sleeping. We had reached the spot where the trees changed and I heard them say I was sleeping. Flying and falling were my only dreams then and they just repeated but in different ways. One day it would all make sense….
Apocalypse Love Song
Through a hole in the roofI watched the end of the world.It was beautiful, nothing at allthe way its portrayed in books or movies. I thought of calling you, but figured you were busy taking a bath, filing your nails or dead, like most everyone else. I felt sad, remembering our encounter at the shoe…
Fire Flowers
“Fire Flowers” first appeared in Rattle In Japanese, the word for “office” is a character composingtwo smaller characters meaning “enclosed space”and “slumping corpse”. Outside, a soft rain’s falling on what was once the corner delibut is now an immense pileof pipes and bricks, chips of cement, and crumpled menus.I used to eat there with my…