2014

His Name is Alive

The sparrows take flights of fancy
riding on the metro. While book monsters
gobble up children’s brains like cotton candy
and fills their heads up with spiders.
Wo ist der furher der mich furht?
Dancing in a macabre light.
Follow me down through the rabbit hole.
Ich warte immer noch.
The devil’s table has six legs,
six legs and a bullet.
I wait for you on the other side of the key hole,
with a bottle of drink me.

Dillon

I’ve never been this close to a boy.

Not to Dillon. Not to anyone.

But now he’s so close I notice the faint smell of toothpaste he must have used hours before. I can see the scar at the corner of his eye where his dad’s ring nicked him in the 5th grade, and I can see the one forming above his lip from the beating he was given yesterday.

“This is going to hurt.” He tells me calmly. Of course he can be calm; he’s not the one on the receiving end of impending pain.

I take a deep breath. “Just do it already.”

Red and Strapless.

I caressed my leg as I stood gazing at my sister’s red strapless dress. I had only but a minute to admire its sleek design hanging there in the closet. I stood there, entertaining the thought of me trying it on.

Oh what a marvelous figure, it would give me, I thought.

It had been days since Lionel had made a stop, it was raining, and the station wagon had begun to reek of sweat and piss. You could feel the weight of the musky scent in the air. Twelve jugs sat, filled to the rim with urine, swishing in the backseat. They were his only quiet passengers. Lionel had exhausted his Vienna-sausage-and-cracker supply at this point. He had also run out of urine storage, and he longed for sleep he wasn’t getting. He needed to make a stop, but he wasn’t sure if he was still being followed. He glanced in