An Early Exit
My eyes grow weary with gazing upward. —Isaiah 38:14 ~I~ “We don’t get out much anymore.” That’s how she puts it, trying to swat a fly and finish telling her pastor why her Coley keeps holed up in his shop out back with this hankering to put life in a headlock and squeeze until there’s a pop and blood from the nose, why there’s no more church, not with those Holy Rollers leapfrogging in tongues to impress. God? Sure, but even so. “His knees ain’t what they used to be.” I nod. Either...
Read MoreThe Christian
Coffee and doughnuts. I remember the vast sanctuary with its naked wooden pews — maroon cushions, hard backs — lined on either side with stained glass windows — red, green, and yellow — and the vast cross taking up the wall behind the podium. Rock wall, scraggly rock. How you’d have to come out the door and go down a flight of stairs and along a wide, cold, marble-floored hallway to the men’s room through a door that seemed much too small, and how it was even colder in there, smelled like cotton candy from the puck-shaped pink deodorizers at...
Read MoreLust and the Holy
I lust for you at sunset Your gold your shimmer I crave your wild display Your crimson your fuchsia your peach I yearn for you on the mountain I want what you give to the moon I want to know you carnally in every form of the holy Elephant-headed Ganesha wrap your trunk around me Blue-stained Krishna meet me where the lotus blooms Mantis Coyote Raven show me the tricks of desire And you, O nameless one, you fire that is never...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of July 15 (Surrealism)
This week’s pieces take a surrealistic view of everyday life: blending dreamlike and realistic imagery with surprising results that point to greater truths. Robert Repino’s fiction piece, “Erase,” explores the nexus of paranoia and technology in the Information Age. Harley April’s story, “Bottom Dwelling,” takes us out to dinner at a place that becomes increasingly more unsettling. John Szabo’s prose poem, “My Bobble Head Dashboard Deity,” ponders the nature of religion with the help of said bobble...
Read MoreBottom Dwelling
I walk around the city with my bible under my arm: the newest, glossiest edition of the local rag, rating the city’s best cheap eats. That’s when it hits me — I might as well be called Shrimp. Small, curled up, and festering upon itself, that’s the shrimp. I had walked past Lazzo’s, #3 on the list, so many times in the scramble of the alphabetland blocks downtown, the helter of mismatched storefronts I found so hard to take seriously. It didn’t even resemble a pizza place, with its blue-and-white hand-lettered sign, so un-Italian in my sensory lexicon. I was on my way to take a...
Read MoreErase
See, you can’t just erase the information. There’s no such thing anymore. When you put her name into that search engine and hit ENTER, it got stored in (on?) the computer by all these — I don’t know — these little robots or something, and they filed it away with their segmented metal hands into secret compartments that you’ll never find. It’s like the machine is designed to work against you, to pit you against yourself, so that you can’t trust yourself anymore. And now the truth is out there, and you have to pray that it doesn’t find its way back to...
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