As a courtesy, the government manlets the manager sit in onthe surveillance. But the cameras are the hotel’s, and the manager thinksit’s his courtesy. The other agentsin the room could set him straight,but their chief signals them to stand down. On the screen they’re watching,a man viewed from the ceiling in green lightuneasily sleeps. Earlier…
Category: Magazine Content
Signals of Fear and Uncertainty
There is a fist-sized hole in the concrete floor and another in the ceiling. The hole in the floor is bearded with sunblack shit, and at night the beetles climb out of it and crawl across my toes. The smell is worse in the daytime. Sometimes I stand under the hole in the ceiling and…
Dishonorable Trade
the rain chills him to the marrow.he is meant to be human, not humane,and the potential of the axe is resting, for now, on the scaffold. a lady’s head is bowed as she steps forward to the crowd, the weather darkening her hair, weighing her crown. the man can see the vertebrae of her spine,…
DADT
My best friend in the Air Force was gay;she separated eighteen months before DADT became NOYFB. She worked in the basehospital; I worked the flightline. Once on a frosty October morning, tumble-weed skeletons piling up on the perimeter fence, I walked into her clinic. She wore her BDUswell, I thought. With blue gloves she lifted…
The November We Are Fifteen
Previously published in Crack The Spine. The November we are fifteen we run away and the boys around the block put us up in a motel room on the turnpike that has a hole in the door so we can see everyone’s sneakers shuffling past. We write poetry and eat potato chips all week and…
98 Ianthe
Previously published in Shimmer. You used to be in the band; now you work on the asteroid. People you have to work with, they ask about it all the time when they find out. And they always find out – somebody always tells them. They all want to know what that’s like. “You used to…
Empty Frames
They are in a field in one of the two town parks. This is the larger, nicer park, and so this is the park they like to take their children to on the weekends so that they may soak up the things that magazines say they should be soaking up. Children like jumping in colorful…
The Keepers
Carla and I draw our blood in the auditorium. They collect our specimens in Dixie cups and send them to a laboratory. Do it! Do it! they urge us. We disrobe and I masturbate onto their microscope slides. My performance improves when I look at Carla’s breasts. My performance diminishes when I look at Carla’s…
Elicit
“Elicit” was originally published in Forklift, Ohio. I am the stretch of easementbeneath a stretcher beneathyour broken body, your weight,and I hate that the last hand you feltwas gloved in blue latex, attached to a man who detached himselffrom the boy who lay bleedingbefore him. I am the minivanand the pilot, frame and feet, I…
Belasis and Hastur
It is the first cold night of Autumnand I smoke a cigarette to myselflooking up to the sky;you can’t see many stars from the citybut you can see Belasis and Hastur, the new constellations. When they first appeared two weeks ago,no one knew what to dobut crane their necks upward to see,everyone asking the same…