Radar, American barn owl ambassador, Cleveland Museum of Natural History Wildife Center, Oct. 24, 2025. Photo by Alex Gray

Michigan is home to a brilliant array of wildlife. Although the state has suffered ecological damage over the years, conservation efforts have helped restore native species, such as the beaver. Once extirpated, or locally extinct, from Michigan due to the fur trade and habitat loss, beaver populations have been on the steady rise since 2008 through reintroduction efforts and conservation surveys.

It was five months after Donald Trump’s second inauguration before Americans returned to the streets in protest of his administration’s growing misdeeds.

The first No Kings protest occurred on June 14th (~2,100 separate events) with an estimated 4.5 million people attending. The second was on October 18th (~2,700 separate events), with an estimated 5-6.5 million people in attendance. Depending on methodology, No Kings, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, and the Women’s March in 2017 (also in opposition to Trump) rank as the three largest protests in U.S. history.

Across the small lunch table in our break room, John was trying to dismantle a mechanical pencil that somehow broke at his desk. His attention was fully focused on the pencil, reminding me of someone trying to defuse a bomb. However, mine kept drifting to the email that we had gotten over the weekend.

Our boss, Matt, announced that he had to lay off a few employees in our department for budget cuts, though he never said who. The whole office was on edge ever since the email came through. Causing people to try and overachieve in their tasks.

On Thursday, I remember the visage of a yellow phone booth from down Second Plum Street. Decades spoke wonders of the fellow. The paint was chipping, and the handle was worn by countless fingers–an equivalent to a confessional. Nonetheless, my eyes peer upon it. There’s never a line or long lingerer. It’s the most run-down phone booth in town. If only the smudged-up windows could talk—you think they’d spill any secrets? Maybe there’s a secret code to being a phone booth. ‘What’s spoken in the booth, stays in the booth.’ Or something of the like.

I spend militant amounts of time
gnashing my inner-chimp to
Justify
Entrails sit in languid writing
Stuffed mindly, biding
Exceeding my own alchemy

Plaque upon the joints
Disjointed by
A lack of puppeteer
Spindle binded tightly
Nightly walking
waking with Head
inside the sink

Pore pretty girl
Hyena’s
Solo-raised girl
Woman by seven
Spread throughout the room

My mask falters
I am so aggravated
by tedious folds in my
mutant Birth

No Bible of yellow stars
could befit this tall order
I pander in this
shed-skin Bed

Steal weather from the
forecast
doppler tells me I am a
Typecast

Invisibility
a strange equine
at the petting zoo
Striped

Binary thought-maps
Trot twice
if you’re ready for the
Show

You make an excellently
melancholy Ball Buster
plead with Laughing eyes
through gash and gnashing

So you’re going to think this is absurd.

I ate a burger today.

Yes, I know—that isn’t very eventful at first glance. But I’m telling you, there was something about that burger that set everything else in motion. Or maybe it wasn’t the burger at all. Maybe it was the moment that came after or perhaps even before.

“I don’t …”

His voice trembled, fragile as glass on the verge of breaking.

He stood alone in a long white hallway that stretched impossibly far in both directions, so uniform and clean it seemed less like a place and more like an idea. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic. The walls had no seams, no corners, no imperfections–only endless white. A white that seemed meant only for pencil marks—words not yet written. At the very end stood a single blue door. It was the only color in the world. He swallowed, his throat tight, tears slipping down his face.

Just Keep Smiling

I. Burnout

I’m going to:
Wake up every morning smirking,
When I see my eyes from overworking.
’Cause my white-collar nine to five,
Has put me into fucking overdrive.

Then I’ll:
Do the dishes and make black coffee,
Pay my taxes and do the laundry.
’Cause I love this culture conformity,
God bless American society.

Driving down the I-94,
Empty bottles rattle on the floor,
In my wife’s white Ford Explorer,
When ahead… to my horror —

The sun used to shine brighter then.

Mark still remembered his face. His laugh. The way the young lad had smiled as if he had an angel peeking from behind his face. The way he used to throw his arms and full body out the window and cheer as the two of them drove along those winding roads, the air roaring past like nothing in the world could touch them. Carefree. Untouched. Alive.