In the last remaining minutes of the year I tiptoefrom the party and out the back doorto breathe in what is left and what will soon be gone,to salvage some small silence before the corks popand the sky burns with crackling rain. This would be the perfect moment for a cigaretteif I hadn’t decided now was the time to kick the habit.So I turn to my old habit of eavesdropping – listeningto gossip in the undertones of dark hours. The winter wind rustles the remains of a magnolia tree.The …
Grief in Summer
Life said, See this dead birdon your evening walkwhere tree becomes root,and now I want to stainmy hands with soil. I want the throb of a strawberryand the burst of redflowering gums against tepid sky. I want golden hour coffee,the kind that will keep my chestthrumming past midnight. I want the warm milk breathof anyone I love on my skin. There are two sorrows—what is no longer,and what never was. And stillwhat is yet to be lostis a third thing.Haunting, pulsating. I …
Insurance
It’s raining, and the living room ceiling drips, drips, and drips because the husband passed up on that free roof inspection and maybe he was afraid of the problems it might reveal, and his father-in-law now lives in the basement, and the husband and the wife keep finding blood-blotted tissues that look like Rorschach tests in the wastebasket, and the father-in-law won’t go to the doctor no matter how much the husband and the wife beg him, and the rain gets louder and louder, and the hole in the …
Berlin Hustle
We settled on the gay neighborhood, my wife Jessie and I, because it was familiar. My older brother had lived in Berlin in the 1980s, on Goltzstraße, down the block from Café M, one of Bowie’s haunts during his epoch-making years there. I remember my first pilgrimage to the bar, marveling at the way grizzled, veteran drunks perched themselves at the same wobbly, tin tables as second-hand-styled teens—leathery, habit-driven creatures of the savannah quenching their thirst …
To the Ones We Knew Only for a Moment
Today we saw his heart beating for the first time, and our hearts responded with a giddy flush. This sea of black, housing a cocoon, housing a smaller sea, encircling a butterfly. When I went home, I started straightening up my existing daughter’s room. We’ve recently rearranged her furniture, and some objects haven’t found their new nooks. I reached in the corner and picked up a small crystal ball, attached to a clear plastic string. This used to hang in a window behind her bed, but …
Cyclops
And then the Cyclops winked back. DG writes. Artwork by Anthony Guardado (@vinoburrito on all socials), a Bay Area illustrator known best for his fan works. He enjoys vending at art events, building plastic models, and general tomfoolery ← Return to the issue …