In these United States
This Union
This US
Trammeled & trampled
& put aside

For later we will
For our country we will
For our cities
We will stan & star & stand & fight

YOU’RE IN a town square in Croatia with the greatest film of all time in your luggage. The arditi are coming and if your rescuer takes a few more minutes, you’ll have to hightail it out of Istria on foot. You check your pocket watch; it’s an hour before noon. Your right hand is in your greatcoat, gripping the firm, comforting wooden handle of your revolver.

I was a worker or so it’s said
a worker that took too much
too many breaks
too many handouts
too many quiet moments alone in the shop bathroom

THE LOCAL laundromat: a perpetual cleansing spot for the city’s dirt and shame.

At night, the neon sign above the storefront glows half-enthusiastically, so much so that most of the letters are completely burnt to their end. The remaining ones spell out “Land rat” — a welcoming endorsement for a place where people come in to wash the crumbs off their pants.

STEVIE LOVED to swim. If there was one thing he loved more than swimming though it was swimming in someone else’s pool, some Russian guy he’d never heard of, on a beautiful morning, in a gated villa on one of the Canary Islands.

Midwinter: the water was cold, like the chill of the ocean, only a few hundred metres away, but Stevie was in his element. After a few brisk laps he pulled himself up to the side, smiled at his girlfriend who was sat, lounging and reading and fiddling with the shark-tooth necklace she’d found, looking beautiful.

MONDAY

On Monday, the news anchor will mock me,
call me ugly and talentless.

She’ll laugh
her cruel laugh,
and provide unassailable proof:

You have lost loved ones,
which can only mean
that you
and your love
are disposable.

GERGUS COMBED her fingers through the wavy hair on her stomach. She twirled the pencil in her other hand and looked up at the sky. She closed her eyes.

The sun lit her eyelids partially shaded by her thick brow. After a few deep, measured breaths, the patches of pink light started to change color and shape.

(or, an unfortunate series of unrelated things)
or lesser evilism
spectres of want and tragedy
our rape of revered ghosts
our politics of melancholy and cigarette smoke
the distressed voter
the incurable and dying worker lashed to incurable and dying pay scale

Come file off the rust of my grommets.
I have been longing to blow smoke into your apertures.

You remember the frozen steel of that stiff winter night,
How gleaming oil coursed across the gouged surface
Of that thing I have

​​It isn’t just giving up one time
It’s choosing to give up every day
That’s what completes the circuit
There is no other way to stop the Death Machine

In a year (and half)
of fire
we learn a list of items
equally quotidian
and flammable

We are the fisherfolks, the gentlefolks, we don’t
Crosstalk over top-hats, tailcoats. They come
Visit from the city, twice every month. They want
Our fishes, our dishes, our bread.

THE STUPID asshole tried to kill us.

Or is it, ‘It tried to get us killed’?

Good that it didn’t succeed. Thank God! Thank Good Lord Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Larry, Curly and Moe.

Fucking asshole. Depraved selfish self-centered misarranged asshole.

THERE I was, alone. It seemed so sad, made even sadder by the mud and the rain and the faint chirps of brittle birds in brittle trees far away. To think, I thought, that I would be here, in this moment, half buried in the bulk of mud as my blood life bled out of my living life. But, it wasn’t like Hemingway wounded somewhere in Italy, his life, like a handkerchief adrift long enough to know not knowing before returning, almost wistfully, to it’s breast pocket. My life left and I stayed with it.