life

  • Native Son, Still Awake

    Native Son, Still Awake

    It’s 3:40 in the morning, and I’ve been here before. More times now than I care to remember.I wake up maybe a little before, open my eyes, stare off into darkness and think I can make out shadows within the stark black. I bring my hands close to my face and check—I can’t see them.…

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  • Morning Vespers

    Morning Vespers

    I pray I still have coffee.Find a pod.Plop and push—she percolateswarm brown juice. Grab a enameled steel mug with a handle,but make the oats in a white bowl first—microwaves and steel don’t mix.I’m sure there’s a dead cat somewherewhen I tried.Pour them in after,add blueberries and walnuts because I read they’re good for you.But blueberries…

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  • Different Ways to Go White

    Different Ways to Go White

    Garth Mitchell had a crooked smile. He’d wrinkle and scrunch his nose, squint his eyes—hoped his nose was pushing down the middle of his upper lip in equal measure, making the edges rise. It was a wreck of a smile, all work and no reward. His hair went white at thirty-two, and he was quick…

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  • That Tracks.

    That Tracks.

    The market was sliding and gold with it. If there were rules once, they weren’t working. Jack crumpled a Post-it. A buddy’s buddy said Go West Young Man in the seventh. Go West went south. Jack lost his reserve. He knew better. He didn’t. He scratched the bottoms of his front pockets—jeans worn thin 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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  • The Bill

    Hey. Hey, I said, and wondered when she had stopped saying Hi baby, sweetheart, well hello there—any of the phrases I’d looked forward to hearing as she tried her hardest to make the ordinary less than. I was surprised she answered at all. Ninety-five percent of the time I got her voicemail, which in the…

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  • Intersection

    Intersection

    October 21, 2025 I tried to find meaning in the numbers today,arranging them forward and backward,stacking them like tired integers.They all fall in their twenties,and perhaps that is meaning enough. Today is like any other dayonly in this: it will not return.This notch on the yardstick of time,rigid, measured, singular,exists for me alone.The One who…

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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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