journal entry

  • When I Open My Eyes

    When I Open My Eyes

    Sad music creaks from a speaker with a cracked woofer. The record player spits treble and scratches, fizzing on the low notes. She doesn’t mind. She knows this song by heart—could trace every flat and sharp in her mind. The sadness fills the room, seeps into her red-rimmed eyes. Tears well up and sit at

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  • Funnel

    Funnel

    The head of the tornado is a wide, open mouth—swallowing clouds, light, dust,the stray wing of a passing bird.Some things fall in gently;others are ripped from their roots.Where it touches down,the finger of God stirs the world—a chaos that is also a kind of order. This house is taken, that one spared.The path seems random,unless

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  • The Compressor’s Cough

    The Compressor’s Cough

    Maybe it’s the telling that makes them live: passed on, embellished, misremembered, or lost. bb grey The old guy had stories to tell and an audience to listen. I was twelve, jumpy, and loud inside from being quiet too long—pressing a pillow over thoughts that didn’t belong. I loved stories. They were television in my

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  • Lobo me

    Lobo me

    I thought how you thought of yourself as the moon— brilliantly white light, a dot of hope in eternal black. But even your light wasn’t yours. Reflection. And the howling below—that was real. Lobo, me. Smooth surface. You could trick yourself into seeing a smile there. But the truth: scars skip the surface, sink steeply—pieces

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  • Brass Sharpens Brass

    Brass Sharpens Brass

    October was more than half over. Halloween should’ve been everywhere, but the aisles were already plastic Christmas—perfect, except for being plastic. Thanksgiving sat between like a spacer, there to keep the momentum through the new year. Time moved the way stores wanted it to move: on to the next thing. You either spent, or you

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  • Handlebars

    Handlebars

    I had given myself a week to understand dying this time around. The news arrived with a percentage—fifty-fifty—which meant either everything or nothing, depending on how I chose to look at things as they stood. There would be no worrying about having saved enough, no being a burden to my children and what remained of

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  • Tax Day

    Tax Day

    from Brown and Black Days Well, it’s tax day. Sort of. Everyone knows tax day as April 15, but if you’re a live-by-the-edge, self-employed, always-worried-because-maybe-you-did-something-wrong kind of filer, then October 15 is the day you know you have for your extensions to be filed. But even that anxiety is relative. One day taxes are in

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  • Spectators

    Spectators

    The sun is practicing its escape,pulling a blanket of cloudsover its tired shoulders.I watch it go. This gray afternoon has been a thief,lifting me from my own life,leaving me with thoughtsthat don’t fit my hands. I’ve been counting victories,stacking them against the losses.The sky holds its own scale—evening will be the judge. There is a

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  • The Currency of Knowing

    The Currency of Knowing

    Journal Edition The mind is quiet this morning.No blaze, just a low light.That’s okay. The world insists we know at once,as if understanding were a switch,not a seed. I dreamt a stalk rising into the sky,a ladder of green—something to send me upand bring back downwhat I knew could grow. So much of what we

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  • crack

    crack

    Some people are addicted to chaos because peace is unfamiliar.—Unknown The calendar circles something close. I don’t mean to wound—only to tell the truth: we’re speaking across a distance we built, one line at a time. You said, “We need to have a conversation.” It lands like corporate speak, a eulogy before the body’s even

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