Come on, pick up the phone. I kicked some pebbles and scattered them. The streetlight was jaundiced. I felt ill from its flickering. The night was cold. Not windy, but cold. I felt a buzz and heard the phone ring, a hangover from a time when the phones had chimes, but now it was obsolete. People just liked to know that they were still on the line. “Hello?” It wasn’t the voice I wanted to hear. It was deeper, jovial. Had to be her boyfriend. “Hey man, is Destiny there? She said she was …

In church, Lee conjured herself another mother. Not the small, faded woman who sat next to her in the wooden pew, but a woman with long, loose hair, one who smelled of jasmine and wore a blue silk dress. Lee could picture the woman so clearly that she could see the faint laugh lines at the edges of her eyes, the freckles on the underside of her jaw. A pain shot through Lee’s upper arm, and she gasped. “Stop that right now,” Lee’s real mother hissed, her fingernails digging into Lee’s …

He’d done as he was told. Did what he promised. It didn’t take long to adjust. After a week of training, Wayne started the overnight sorting shift at the garbage facility just off downtown. He found if he spiked his rum with Alka-Seltzer, he could make it through the entire night without his back cramping up, and if he chewed gum, he never stank of booze— just tropical fruit mixed with burned coffee from the never-ending pot in the lobby of his new home, the LAX Holiday Inn. Working …

I lost count of the bubbles today. I don’t have a clear concept of how long that long time has been–only that at this place, where the words “Welcome to Seafood Hut” drop limply from the cook’s lips when the door chimes and a customer enters, there is no other meaningful way to measure the passage of time. Sometimes, the cook’s greeting is timed simultaneously with the lazy gush of the filter, and the smaller bubbles throw themselves against my shell’s edges and cut themselves into seafoam. …

Unable to sleep (unfinished work, lab reports) (don’t ask, don’t ask), but tomorrow’s pickup day, so I make myself get out of bed to take out the trash. As I’m walking to the gate, I see myself, back from taking out the trash. He’s carrying a scale under his arm. I’m not (yet). I want to ignore him; I hope he’s going to ignore me. At least the moon is up; the moon is fat and yellow and full. If there are now two of me all over again, there aren’t two of those (yet (checking) ok). The air …

My community is bolts and washers. Alloyed metal is the fusion of two, just like me, but I’m alone in this aisle. Plumbing is what we don’t want to see; we put it behind cupboards or in the ground, but the heart is dependent on pathways and valves. I could stay here for hours if only the men in those orange aprons would leave me alone. Love is geometry, yes, but I’m overwhelmed by the possibility of so many angles. Well, not overwhelmed— I see the extrapolations, lines and their intersections, …