SourPopsi

Once when I was little I found salamanders Black skinned and shining Slipping over each other like ribbons I wanted them to be mine So I took them home And put them in a jar I made sure to be safe - poking holes in the lid with my mechanical pencil But I was scared they’d leave So I made sure the holes were small And the lid screwed down extra tight But I was also scared they wouldn’t be happy Away from the world they’d known The calm serenity of their sleepy pond with its algal clouds Their friends the beetles and the water skippers So when it started to rain I put the jar outside A taste of home I thought S

We stink now Not in the olfactory sense Not in the same way that being sick on a school day stunk. Slang stink that's  not this. This stink floats on our skin like a rainbow floats on oil. It hangs between us and over us our own little cloud. You're so sad and so pretty Beached whale sad ripe apple pretty. And me I'm just a paper airplane at this point sitting on a table with the potential for flight or a semblance of flight singing through my folds. This stink is a being it has its own moods and smiles. It wraps its arms around us and pulls us in. It is a stranger that followed us home. It is a vampire we invited inside. It is the

In the end we will be invisible and no one will ever know us or why. In the end all we will be are hands that held too fast too hard too long.

It's your angles. I can't read them. Or maybe you are just a wall Into your cracks I carve my prayers when  really I should throw them over you into the greener grass on the other side. I find myself hugging the edges of you circumnavigating your being this new world wild and wide. But maybe  that is my doing. Maybe you wrote me a map with careful clarity guiding yourself through yourself compass in hand your findings sent tied to the legs of invisible pigeons dusting their wings through the foggy miles between us. And perhaps even I received them but ignored them or lost your messages in the clutter of things that I carry like a snail carr

What everyone knows about Delilah is that she's gorgeous. She's tiny and permanently pre-teen in appearance, with cartoon-big eyes and perfect skin. Her body is immaculate; she runs around the lake every morning, ear buds jammed in, tiny feet pounding furiously as she runs almost impossibly fast. Everyone knows she knots feathers in her hair, ties them to her clothing, hangs them from her rearview mirror. She's childlike, with her tiny wrists and her wide sad eyes, and so everyone touches her head or pulls her to their body or picks her up and dumps her over their shoulder, which makes her shriek and giggle but I know it also makes her a litt

The yard behind her home was a haunted, beautiful place. I cannot remember the inside of her house very well, only two dogs and a long blue hallway. But her gardens are vivid in my mind, her yard a deep-rooted memory. Her house, which perched like a fat yellow bird in the middle of a tangle of trees, had a series of long low wooden boxes bristling with flowers and herbs and vegetables wrapped around it in a perfumed bouquet. It was quaint and darling garden, one which I'm sure brings forth intense admiration from all her guests. "Oh how lovely!" we all exclaim. But if you follow the boxes back around the house, climb up six stone steps, and

1. First Kiss Regina had quick brown eyes and wore her hair long and wild, which is why Dallas asked her to the dance. Her baby blue dress scratched his palms as he held her awkwardly against his body and swayed to the music. He was fourteen and she was almost fourteen. He kissed her when they left the dance and she didn't kiss him back, but she let him kiss her and even held his hand on the way home. As they rode, Dallas feeling his heart flutter with Regina's pulse against his skin, he happened to catch her mother's gaze in the rear view mirror. Her mother's eyes betrayed a furious anger that Dallas realized she was unable to voice. Her ey

Vérité Georgia Fischer was very proud. Very goddamn proud. Georgia stood on the sidewalk, her fist proudly rooted on a hip, feet planted and legs stiff. She beamed up at Vérité, and her beautiful building beamed back down at her. Her building. Hers. It was done. It'd been done technically for months, of course. But now, well, it was alive. She allowed herself a moment of nostalgia, as she took a deep, satisfied drag from her cigarette. She remembered the first sketch; her pencil was scribbled to almost nubs, and the light from the streetlamp glaring through her window painted everything a violent orange. It was alw

I. Nothing exists. The prologue is blank. II. Something bursts. Suddenly Suddenly there is existence. Suddenly there is potential. Chance is explosive and endless, and time begins in silence. III. Things grow cold-hot things and hot-cold things. Vapor things. Lonely elements bond and move in the great tantric discovery of creation. IV. The world is born becomes a place. But she wears only red and smokes and simmers with the heat of her birth. V. Time eats away the fire, and the world is tamed into calm and gray. And peace grows and silence grows. VI. The seas form wide and wild and empty. VII. Slide deep. Th

I feel your pulse move under a sky of flesh wild as a captured bird.