lovelyanabiosis

    The sky was scarred by lighting, flashing off every few seconds. The air tasted metallic and thick. While there were clouds, pregnant and heavy, the rain had yet to start, and the suspense of the impending storm caused the hairs on their arms to stand erect.              “I can’t believe you lost your dog,” Susan said, huffing as she shined a flashlight between two houses, sweeping the light over the gap. Mark thought he could sense her hope – the fine, golden hairs on her arms raised in anticipation, desperately wanting to see two eyes reflecting back at her. There was nothing but darkness.            Mark sigh

One of the mermaids is throwing pebbles at Tink’s tree. She flits out on toothpick bones, her crusted sugar wings splintered,   just like broken glass. “What do you want?” Her voice is deeper than two inches, gutted like her tree, her throat thick with grit. The mermaid runs webbed fingers through her tangled net of hair. "You know." Her words are an ocean   breeze, hissing and balmy. Tink rubs her nose and pinches the bridge. Her nostrils are raw and red and scabbed with powder. Her eyes are murkier than swamp water, and she is tired, but still she magics from the seam   of her jungle leaf dress a bag of

The day is happy, with the sun shining and birds chirping, the pigs grunting in their cart, waiting to die, to be hoisted by their legs and thrown into the waiting box. The lid will be closed, the CO2 pumped in, and the interns will make sure the pigs suffocate until they are serene and ready for the knife of a quiet immigrant worker, ready for lunch, humming in her place on the slaughter-line. She is happy with her place in life – not an intern but a full-time worker, turning pigs into just pork that will be packaged and boxed and shipped – just meat now, just dead. The grocery store is dead, in the middle of a mid-a

     To see his truck pull away seemed so out of place and so far away she felt as if she was looking into the future; twenty or thirty years down the road when the air between them had grown stale and stagnant and the friction between their bodies, like static shock, had simmered down to something that left a bitter, gritty film on their teeth – that no matter how hard they tried to tongue them clean, the taste would still be there, like gasoline or worse. And they would be choking every day on this grit until it threw gravel down their throat and encased their hearts in concrete shells.     And she would be too hoarse to call for him

there was a time when the cupid's bow of her lips were prone to my hushing finger, nestled in that little dip, warm and aglow with her soft breath; fingers of brown curls laid across her jaw and her brow was soft and lax. creases like folded paper grew in the corner of her eyes and they faded to a sick-pale green; we were aging quick and fast, though i wondered if the youth of our love was slipping away too or if it was solid and sure. once when the velvet night was seeping in our bedroom through the curtained window, breathing and fogging against the bed, i wrapped my arm tight around her waist only to feel her pull away.

Sand * * * "Only the dead have seen the end of the war." George Santayana * * * Everything tasted like sand. This was his first meal back, his first meal after the blazing Iraq sun, after the food in the Chow Hall. There were blank stares and awkward silences. The scraping of his mother's fork on her plate grated on his nerves, but not half as much as the proud, dopey smile that twitched the corners of her lips each time her glossy eyes flitted cautiously across the table at him. He watched his plate carefully, but he could tell when he was being stared at.            "Two fucking years," his brother said, the silence shattered. Their

five hundred years from now schools on mars will be flooded with children who have never known gravity and who see only in the color red. somewhere on a distant planet long forgotten and forever barren i will be buried underneath the cold hard ground -- the dirt of my grave whipped around in circles, riding the fingers of cold winds and scattered in the thicks rays of a sun exploded. my old bones will be engorged with ancient knowledge left to crumble and teach the wriggling worms secrets that the children will never know.

we're rubbed raw -- there's wax between my thighs and the volatile nature of us, our souls, what we could one day be erodes away this whatever it is: grunting and choking beneath silk sheets and bruises and wet skin -- until there's nothing left but a fine dust that's breathed away by a fine gust of wind and what we were was two corrosive chemicals waiting to react but what we are now is nothing but a salt or a grain or something left bleeding and forgotten.