All the way from poppy seed to jackfruit, we are told to measure each week, each stumble and kick. From produce to blood levels we weigh chances the way we weigh ourselves, breath held, fear crawling up our naked skin. We don’t budget for peaches and avocado; grapefruit and corn. We don’t expect time to lapse with soap scrubs reaching beyond the elbow, under nail beds scrubbing our lifelines down to broken. The smell of unsullied skin, how it lingers, sticks fast to the nose, …
It is believed that Sushruta, the ancient Indian physician, first used spherical balls of sesame seeds as an antiseptic to treat his patients. From there, laddoos gradually began taking shape as the sweet we’ve come to know and love today. Besides being dragged into comparison with apples to point out glaring incongruencies, oranges can have other uses too— like Vitamin C, like juice at breakfast, like the piquant taste of something nostalgic, like a prop to show how a …
With the invisibility they gave as if I had no body, only soul wavering up or down stairs, I stole. From my stepmother's alligator patterned wallet removed bills. Or was there never such thing as unquenchable spirit & no angels singing above the 7-11 as I whispered across its fluorescent lit tiles? Just miles of nerves & trillions of cells churning conversions of glucose & O2 to energy in time to the slurpee machine's stirred vats of uranium green, lava …
I am the baloney in the sweet woman sandwich flanked by my angel food mother and daughter known for their honey sauces their endless supply of surrender to the greater good they both may say I am a sweetbread too, but I know I am only minced up organ meat that comes from throat and brain the one that sometimes feels the need to shout out savory bitter truths in hope that real can also be revered and share a place on our inviting earthenware plate Susan Shea is a …
troglodyte femme fatale she’s a midnight hoot all the fang-boys love her silky mane, fingernails an orange sherbet clunky green boots, ripped fishnet stockings malodorous pheromones, a psychic turn-on she’s no momma’s girl & daddy’s long gone Marlboro lights and BV chasers, her a.m. pick-me-up she sucks at miniature golf and laser tag digs Bukowski, Patti Smith worships Ted Hughes she loves honky-tonk polka, double four-time met herself a fine young Liverpool lad— snuck …
Did you take it into your mouth feel its roundness and warmth did the rays shoot up and out from your eyes and didn’t everyone see that didn’t they comment on it and didn’t this go on for years like the sun would linger just above the horizon until at last sun kissed land and land swallowed sun and didn’t the temperature drop then as a changed light drained from your eyes and hasn’t it come now night deep and uncertain has night truly come? Bill Hollands’ work has been …
