Micros
NOT HANDLED WITH CARE by M.A. Boswell
After Olivia tore out of the parking lot, Hyundai stuffed with all the nice shit from their place, Josh mixed batter and slammed it into a bruised Teflon pan. He’d survived on easy food before, when other exes ruined his life. Josh flipped the pancake, watched it coil into a lopsided heap. Earlier, Olivia changed the title of their shared playlist from Babe to You’re a literal adult child, deleted everything except one Taylor Swift breakup song. Josh rammed his spatula under the wreckage, realizing how bad this would be. The pancake grinned from the plate, torn and ugly, but never judging.
January 11, 2025
Fiction
PEGGY by Daisy Alioto
Peggy got down on her knees and asked God to send her a good man. She thought she had one in Jack but her friends told her that he wasn’t a good man, or if he was, he was good in the way that men are good which is different from the way that women are good. Something about the difference between a deal and a contract. Peggy thought all goodness was the same and maybe the goodness in Jack was hiding. For six months Peggy and Jack had dinner once a week until one day he stopped answering her calls. “He’s just not that into you,” her friends said. But wouldn’t he have said that around the time they promised that they would always be honest with each other? And couldn’t he have said that before or after he told her, I feel like I can tell you anything?She called his house at doubling intervals — one day, every two days, every four days, every eight days, every sixteen. “Stop calling,” her friends said. “He’s going to think you’re crazy.” But just in the way Peggy knew Jack was good, she knew she wasn’t crazy, so why should it matter. “What if he’s dead?” she asked. “What if he’s hurt?” Then one or another friend would say they just ran into him in the supermarket. So Peggy got back down on her knees. “Kind and capable,” she thought, that’s all I want God. Then she spoke it out loud in case God wasn’t listening with his brain-ears. “Kind and capable, please.”She had three recurring dreams about Jack. In the first one he was smothering her with a pillow. In the second he was holding her under the waves while she drowned. In the third, which was the most violent, he was stabbing her in the bony place between her breasts while she held her hands up and tried to take the knives in the smooth basket of her palms instead. The dreams were eerily silent, like the moment before Jack’s automated voicemail kicked in. The only voice in the dream was Peggy’s, always asking the same question: “Why are you doing this?” Years passed and God sent Peggy several ok men. Jack died, not from suffocation or drowning or stabbing, but prostate cancer. For months after his funeral Peggy told anyone who would listen that she was disappointed in the catering. “Jack hated horseradish,” she told her friends. “Jack hated cold cuts. Anyone who knew him would know that.”
January 10, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
David Simmons Recommends: Brian Evenson, Charlene Elsby, Kelby Losack & J David Osborne
Brian Evenson, Good Night, Sleep Tight (Coffee House Press, 2024)Brian Evenson is my favorite author of all time so I make it a policy to read whatever he writes.Some of you may already know Evenson as the innovator and pioneer of the this-house-we-just-moved-into-has-more-windows-on-the-outside-than-on-the-inside-so-now-I’m-going-to-burn-it-down-with-my-family-still-inside horror genre. Whether it’s the crime noir-religious cult-horror-mystery Last Days or the schizophrenic-Mormon-fever dream of The Open Curtain, all he drops are bangers. His short story collections are my favorite though. Fugue State and Windeye are two of the best collections I have ever read. So you already know I was too hype to get Brian’s latest collection, Good Night, Sleep Tight.One time, I heard Brian described as “too literary for horror” and “too horror for literary” and at the time, I remember thinking to myself, damn, that’s lame as fuck, so I stopped listening to whatever podcast it was and just drove in silence for a minute. What does that even mean? He can write really well so he’s too good for horror? TF? That’s disrespectful.And yet, I understood what they meant in a way. Brian’s command of language is uncanny, and I imagine it has to do with his time growing up in the Mormon church and then his position in the church itself before he left/got kicked out. (You can read about the Brian Evenson origin story in like every article about Brian ever, and other people have done a way better job of breaking it down than me, but TL/DR, back in the day he got kicked out (?) of BYU and like, excommunicated (?) from Mormonism (?) because his first collection Altmann’s Tongue was way too gangster (not sure if this part is 100% correct but it’s how I imagine it happened) and some lame-ass student filed a complaint. I think. What I’m saying is that he uses language and pacing in a way that makes it read like a reverend from a strange religion in a different time and different universe wrote it. He will use unfamiliar words, or familiar words in strange ways. It’s something to do with the rhythm. And you’re never quite sure where you are exactly, as far as setting. You could be anywhere or nowhere.Take this for example. There is a story in the collection called “Vigil in the Inner Room” and it opens with: By midday father had sickened again, and by nightfall he was dead.This is already a crazy opening line, typical of Evenson. We know that the father has been getting sick and this time his ass died. But it’s the use of the words midday and sickened and nightfall that makes this line hit so hard. He could have used afternoon and got sick and night and the line just wouldn’t have hit as hard. But he didn’t, and because of this, his writing takes you to a different world, a different time. His specific combination of words is like a password that unlocks something inside of you that makes you feel like an early-9th century Chaldean peasant when you read it, eating a hard loaf of bread and sipping wine you made yourself. Maybe I’m not explaining it right. Hold up, let me try again. Brian Evenson’s writing is like the first time you try PCP. That empty feeling where you don’t know who you are, that liminal space where suddenly your clothes begin to seem too small for you, so you wonder if your clothing has actually gotten smaller or if you have gotten bigger, and then you have crazy cotton mouth so you attempt to spit but you can’t spit that far so your spit lands on your North Face sleeve, and then you try to wipe the spit away with your bare hand, and you realize that you have lost the ability to sense things using touch, because you can no longer tell the difference between a spit-covered sleeve or the bare, dry material of the spit-less sleeve, and this makes you wonder if you will still be able to do your job when you clock in at work on Monday, and the whole time you have been thinking this you have been curled up in fetal position in front of a Panera Bread, so now you have to burn your house down with your family still inside it. This is how all of his short stories make you feel. Like you are trapped in a dissociative nightmare that never ends.OK, but whole time, everybody writes book reviews about Brian’s shit. I want to do something a little different. I want to talk about just the opening lines to his stories and how he is the straight up GOAT of openers. In rap music, this is called an opening bar. The opening bar makes the whole song to me. If you don’t come with something so hard that it immediately makes me run around the room in concentric circles screaming “OH SHITTTTTTT” then your music ain’t for me. I feel this way about books too.An example of a great opening bar can be found in the classic motivational record “Cheese and Dope” by Project Pat. In “Cheese and Dope”, Project Pat begins the song with:Out here slangin on this blade prayin that I don't get cutBy these police makin raids, jumpin out and checkin nutsImmediately we are transported to North Memphis, in the summer of 2001, where we have sequestered dope under our ballsack, praying that the police do not throw us up against a wall and frisk us, and we must know what is going to happen next to our hero, Project Pat. Will the nefarious MPD catch up to our hero? Will he make it off the blade in one piece? We have to know.I feel the same way when I read Brian’s work. Take any story from Good Night, Sleep Tight. In “A True Friend”, the first line is: There are times when it hurts to be alive.GYAT! That is a crazy opening bar. The reader has to know more. ISTG if somebody interrupts me before I find out what happens to the narrator I am going to CRASH OUT. Hold up, I’mma quickly flip to another story in the collection. OK, this one is called “The Other Floor”. Sometimes at night–not every night, only rarely–the transition between being awake and dreaming would stretch long enough to become its own sort of time, a time in which it was impossible to know whether he was awake or asleep, a time in which, in the end, it didn’t really matter.WHAT THE FUCK! That is nasty work. First of all, in anybody else’s hands that shit would have been a run-on sentence, but not Brian. That shit is CRAZY. We have to find out what’s gonna happen! We have no choice. This time-shifting weird almost-sleep-purgatory thing he is talking about sounds very interesting, but also, in the end it didn’t really matter. Why didn’t it really matter? Does somebody get killed or some shit? So it doesn’t really matter that this person experiences a dream-like state since they are gonna get bodied anyway? We have to know.In conclusion, Brian Evenson’s Good Night, Sleep Tight is a healthy, homeopathic, all-natural alternative to smoking PCP and I implore you to get trapped in that dissociative nightmare as soon as you finish reading this. Charlene Elsby, The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty (Apocalypse Party, 2023)We define people according to what’s been done to them, not what they have done.I have read this book a couple of times and this quote always stands out to me. Because I agree with it. At first, it sounds brutal, unforgiving. Unfortunate, even. That this is the way we are. And perhaps it is. But that doesn’t make it untrue.In The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty, Elsby asks the question: which is worse: working in the food industry or getting fucked to death/giving birth to millipedes? Just kidding. But not really. The part I found the most horrifying is the abuse the unnamed narrator—living below the poverty line with a dead-ass mom—takes regularly from the people she encounters at school, in the trailer park she lives in, and in the terrible diner she works at. She links up with a few other troubled youths and they explore the psychosexual. And then some REAL serious shit goes down and she embraces her true nature and becomes what she was always meant to be. And all along she is keeping track of the people who wrong her, this poor girl on the margins of society. But where Elsby truly shines, is how we find ourselves really rooting for our narrator, cheering her on, even (ESPECIALLY) when she is burning down her trailer park with everyone in it. Kelby Losack & J David Osborne, Dead Boy (Broken River Books)Brian Schuck’s girlfriend has just committed suicide and Brian is a mess. He has no job and owes money to a perverted gangster with an affinity for dog fighting and sexual violence. And then Brian’s dog—who is devastated from the girlfriend’s suicide—decides to stop eating. When Brian’s dog dies from self-inflicted sadness starvation, his buddy Handle has a brilliant idea, a way to bring the dog back to life. All they need is a bathtub of Monster energy drinks (for the electrolytes, flavor doesn’t matter) and some electricity and our boy can have his best friend back. Unfortunately, it’s too late for the girlfriend.I’m a fan of Osborne and Losack’s solo writing, but when they get together it’s like Bun B and Pimp C. Eightball and MJG. Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine. It’s a classic out the gate. In Dead Boy, you learn a lot about dog fighting while getting hit with the darkest punchlines. I love how all the characters just acknowledge the craziness, the zombie dog, and agree to never speak of it. And all of it gets recorded for Brian’s TikTok. Because that’s the only thing that really fills the empty hole inside Brian. The attention. The engagements. The likes. It’s also very touchy subject matter, suicide, dog fighting, dogs dying and all that. Reading it makes you feel like Osborne and Losack were trying to outdo each other with every line. I asked them about that and Kelby texted me back: when you’re tryna make your homie go “broooooo that’s fucked up” you write crazy shit lol Also, the dog’s name is Mike Jones.
January 9, 2025
Fiction
HERE LIES by Nikki Barnhart
She had only applied to work in the Halloween store because she thought it would be temporary. But this store was open year-round—the building owned, not leased, by a man named Ed, who was thin and wiry, nostalgic and ambiguous as a figure in a Grant Wood painting. The devotion he extended to the rows of ludicrous masks and cackling witch animatronics seemed more suited to the motions of a farmer, tending to something whose harvest would keep people alive, rather than fleetingly amused. Ed preferred silent, solitary work: keeping inventory, tracking shipments in the back room he seemed to live in. He wanted someone to take over the register, be more “front-facing.” “Are you a people person?” he asked her when she first came in. She lied and said yes. In the Halloween store, time was always running out, yet somehow not passing at all. Ed’s business philosophy consisted of keeping a permanent GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign out in the front window to create what he called “a false sense of urgency” in the customer. The music that played during her shift was always the same recording Ed had made of a Top 200 countdown on Labor Day 1993, commercials and all, every day climbing the same apex towards “Heart-Shaped Box.” Then it would start its loop all over again, trapping her inside. She would think of all the other times she had heard these songs over the course of her life—these same songs again and again and now, a million times more. They were engineered for liminal spaces: checkout lines and waiting rooms and traffic jams, to give people the illusion of movement and rhythm when their lives were going nowhere. Usually this time of year, Christmas music took over, the ultimate opiate of the masses, to distract everyone from the cold fact that another year was slamming shut forever. But not in the Halloween store. The music didn’t change. It never would. That would mean something was coming; that would mean something was ending. To stay afloat, the store also sold other holiday items, stocked as if they were perennial: pastel Easter baskets of unraveling wicker, Thanksgiving wreaths of fake papery leaves, snowmen whose bodies were made of Styrofoam and crumbling glitter. It was the snowmen’s season now: winter, at least by some definitions. But this was Florida, and the seasons never really changed, not in any meaningful or significant way. That was her favorite thing about coming here: the pure indulgence in wasting perfect days, because they were in seemingly infinite supply. It didn’t matter what she did or didn’t do with each one, because another would reappear the next morning, new and clean and glaringly bright. She couldn’t possibly be held accountable to change if nothing else around her did. The store was listed on various obscure websites and in off-brand guidebooks as an “oddities destination,” although the people that stopped in were always on their way to somewhere else. Usually, they would stalk the aisles for a minute or two before walking back out empty-handed, muttering there wasn’t much to see, just the same old shit you could get anywhere in October. “Speak for yourself,” she would think as she watched them leave, staring out the display windows into the vanishing point of the horizon. The store possessed the most beautiful natural light she had ever seen in an interior space—that was its most extraordinary quality, what should have been advertised in the guidebooks. Every afternoon, the golden glow that seeped in and wrapped around her nearly brought her to tears. Its beauty had something to do with the time passing, a phenomenon that persisted outside the safe confines of the store. The light was a reminder that life was short, something which was easy to forget whenever she was inside. Even Ed’s sign out front was only a false alarm—time running out rendered merely a marketing tactic and as such, a lie. She came home at night smelling like the plastic that everything in the store was made from, the way she used to come home smelling like coffee when she worked at Starbucks, her first job, her first failed attempt to make a life for herself. But unlike the way coffee’s nutty sweetness had begun to smell foul, the pungent scent of the plastic began to smell not quite sweet, but the next best thing: unnoticeable. Like how when she was a child she realized that all of her friend’s houses had their own special scent, but she could never smell her own. The place she came from always smelled like nothing, like it wasn’t a place at all. From her view at the counter, she could see the rack of personalized tombstone decals, some of the store’s best sellers. People thought it was hilarious to pretend to be dead. HERE LIES ADAM. HERE LIES ANNIE, they went, and so on. She could see her own name hanging there, a straight shot at eye level. When she interviewed for the job, Ed had asked her what scared her the most. She considered the question, really thought about it. But then too much time had passed so she just blurted out, “Nothing.” The word lingered in the stale air of the store. She could sense it hanging over her, like a spirit. She felt it, she believed in it, but that didn’t make it real.
January 8, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
THE TERROR IS THERE: AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY COSTA by Kevin M. Kearney
Emily Costa’s debut story collection GIRL ON GIRL (Rejection Letters, 2024) isn’t a book of horror, at least not in the traditional sense. These stories can be horrifying, sure, and there’s a palpable uneasiness in nearly every chapter, but Costa’s premises are notably banal: girls at an ice cream shop deal with their shitty boss, two moms take their children on a playdate, high schoolers drink warm High Life in a half-empty basement. That’s not to say they’re boring. Costa’s fiction interrogates how those seemingly innocuous interactions are so often charged with aggression and violence—how quickly a welcoming smile can turn into a menacing smirk.Like Bennett Sims’ Other Minds and Juliet Escoria’s You Are the Snake, two other collections from this year, Costa’s GIRL ON GIRL is subtly terrifying, exposing the unsettling realities lurking beneath our common experiences. I’m not surprised at how great the book is—I’d been a fan of her fiction for years, and loved UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT (Autofocus, 2022), her memoir of undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder—but I was still amazed at how seamlessly she pulled it off.I called Costa on GIRL ON GIRL’s official release date to ask her about developing as a writer, assembling a story collection, and figuring yourself out through fiction. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. Kevin M. Kearney: We’re talking on the official release day for GIRL ON GIRL. I know you’re sick, but are you doing anything to celebrate?Emily Costa: I’m…not. I am not teaching today—I had my last class yesterday. I’m all caught up on grading and that is a reward in itself. I’m going to watch a movie tonight and my husband did get a cake, which was really sweet. That’s the extent of it, though.KK: That’s awesome. Does the cake say anything about the book release or is it just a cake?EC: It’s just a cake. It’s from a really nice Italian bakery, so I’m excited about that. It says, like, “Congrats!” or whatever on it.KK: I would imagine if he asked for the book title at a bakery that might lead to problems.EC: [Laughs.] Yeah, not a good idea.KK: Were your students aware of your book?EC: I don’t think so. I finally just switched to the English Department after 10 years and I’m teaching Comp. We’re talking about arguments and all that. But a student just told me that she dropped out of Engineering major to become a Creative Writing major because she really enjoyed the class. So, that was really great to hear. But I don’t think they know about the book, although I am planning a reading. I teach at the school where I got my MFA, so my mentor, my MFA advisor, is planning a reading for the spring. So, they can figure it out. I guess I’ve got to be careful about what I read.KK: A lot of these stories don’t take place in college, but they do take place in high school, or they’re centered on people thinking back on high school. Were you writing much fiction when you were a high schooler?EC: I started writing then. It was really bad. I was attempting to write books about dogs when I was, I don’t know, 8 to 12. I don’t know why. Finally, in high school I thought, “Wait, that’s not just some stupid thing I was doing? I could actually get good at this? Or try? Or take a class?” I was writing. It was really embarrassing. I still have some of that stuff, and…I won’t be revisiting it anytime soon.KK: Was it a very early version of what you’ve now developed? Or was it just Dog Fiction?EC: [Laughs.] I quit the Dog Fiction! That stuff was more…I remember when everything clicked for me Junior year. I had a really good English teacher. I think this happens to everybody. We got to this one portfolio where we got to do all these different writing assignments, showing different parts of ourselves. I guess it was essentially CNF. It was just fun to write in that way. Freshman year, me and my friends were trying to put together a little magazine and it didn’t go anywhere. None of it was really serious, but it was cool to see there were opportunities to do this. And people were encouraging, so that was really nice.KK: When did you start taking writing more seriously?EC: I was an English major, but I didn’t take any Creative Writing classes until I went to grad school. I was just writing here and there. It was fun, but I didn’t ever really know what to do with it. In college, there was a class where we read short stories and wrote essays about them. But one of the assignments was we could write a short story based on one we’d read. I wrote one based on “A&P” by John Updike. It was a lightly fictionalized version of an awful job I had. This is a recurring theme for me. I worked at an amusement park as a 16 year old. It was just bad. But my teacher was really nice to me about it. So that was always in the back of my head: “It’d be really fun to do something with this. I enjoyed this a lot. I don’t love writing essays about Henry James.” So then I eventually decided to pursue the MFA.KK: I’ve never assembled a story collection, so I’m always interested in the process behind putting one together. It seems like everyone has their own philosophy. What was yours? EC: I really just went by vibes, but I wanted to vary the length and the points of view. But there’s so many of the same themes that I didn’t know where to put the one where the cat goes into space. [Laughs.] In conclusion, I didn’t put in a ton of thought and I really just went by feel of whether it felt right together. KK: Reading it felt more like a novel. I struggle with reading through a story collection because I feel like I need to stop at the end of each chapter knowing the next will be wildly different. There are a lot of distinctions between your stories, but it felt like you were always driving at something larger. One of those things is the past—the woman in “Ethan Marino” can’t move beyond the social hierarchies of high school, the mom in “Dead Mall” is fascinated with old toys, the girl in “Balefire” is still processing a traumatic episode from years earlier. What draws you to characters like these, who are so focused on the past?EC: I think that’s me trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. [Laughs.] I don’t know. It’s really just me trying to figure out why I’m so drawn to the past and can’t move forward in a lot of ways in my life. I don’t think I ever figure it out and I think most of these characters end up in trouble because of their focus on the past. There’s a lot of feeling stuck and not knowing how to move forward, and getting it wrong, over and over. What’s been interesting in talking about these stories is I have to be aware of what I did, and a lot of it I didn’t do on purpose. I didn’t know I was writing all of these stories about these people who are really stuck in the past until D.T. [Robbins, publisher of Rejection Letters] was, like, “Write a synopsis.” [Laughs.] Then I realized it and thought, “Shit—what do I do now?” Maybe, by getting it all out on the page, I can move forward. Like I’m lifting some curse. I really don’t know.KK: Like you said, I’m rarely aiming for something in my fiction. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a moral or a theme I’m trying to develop over the course of a story. It’s just a story and I try to make it as interesting as possible or as fun as possible. And then I go back to read it and I can see all these kernels that it feels like my subconscious has planted along the way.EC: Yes. Yes.KK: It’s my brain screaming at me, “You need to deal with this thing.”EC: That’s exactly it.KK: I revisited your memoir about outpatient therapy for OCD, UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT, in advance of reading the collection. At one point, you write, “I know this whole thing, this whole disorder, is about trying to control the uncontrollable, scrambling around in the unknown for footing.” I underlined that immediately and wrote in the margin: WRITING. [Laughs.] EC: I think now it’s starting to feel clearer that it was my subconscious doing it. I don’t know what was going on before. But now I’m looking at the stories I put in and what’s going on in them. I was talking with my friend about CNF versus fiction; about what freedoms you have in fiction versus where you’re stuck in CNF, trying to use what you have in real life and put clues together to figure yourself out. I think I’ve been trying…it’s so navel-gazy and self-absorbed, but I’ve been trying to figure myself out in the fiction, too. I didn’t think I was. But I was drawn to certain things and I was drawn to them because I couldn’t figure them out in my life. What’s been fun in writing fiction is you can do whatever you want. You can choose something you wouldn’t have done in your real life and see what the consequences of that are. You can take it as far as it can go. It sounds so obvious, so many people have come to this conclusion before, but I was really keeping those worlds separate. I have a friend who didn’t know I wrote fiction because they only knew the other stuff, the CNF, but to me I guess they all now just seem intertwined. The stuff I’m working on now is this autofiction stuff—or whatever the hell you want to call it—and I’m calling it that because I was writing it as memoir and felt so stuck, so bogged down and bummed about the past. It felt so sad to me, like trauma porn, and not anything I wanted. I talked to another person about it and they were like, “Just make it fiction.” Oh, duh, okay, obvious. Ever since then, it’s been fun. That was the key that unlocked everything. I’m seeing that they’re not as separate as I was keeping them in my brain.KK: Is this the novel about your dad’s video rental store? EC: Yeah, it is. KK: Is it stylistically similar to your short fiction? Is it at all like your memoir? Is it completely different from both of those?EC: I think it’s similar to the short fiction, but…and this might change, because I don’t know how much mileage I can get out of it…but I’m doing it from a child’s perspective. First person. Starts with me—or the character of Emily, or whatever—at six years old all the way through high school. We’ll see how long I can sustain that. Or if anybody would ever want to read that. [Laughs.] It’s been fun because you’re limited by the age. “Would this character use these words?” That kind of stuff. That part of it is fun. I have a child who’s seven-and-a-half, so I’ve been studying him. If he would say it, then it’s fine. I’ve also been using my own home movies and my grief journals from when I was five to see what I said or what I was interested in. [Laughs.] This is where I’m showing you how clearly stuck in the past I am. Really, really deep into what was going on in 1993.KK: There’s a slight terror simmering in the background of a lot of the stories in GIRL ON GIRL. If the settings were different, someone would maybe call it “gothic.” I know “horror” has been used to describe it. Or maybe genre’s made up and it doesn’t really matter. Is that terror something you were actively aiming for or is that something that naturally seeps into your fiction?EC: I guess it’s just something that naturally occurs. The terror is there. I can see it now. Not to sound like a complete idiot, but I wasn’t aware I was doing that. Maybe it’s because that’s what’s there in real life. But what can we do about it? How can we interact with it? How can we pull it to the forefront?
January 7, 2025
Fiction
FREELOADER by Hazel Zorn
For several days I have been followed by a man I cannot see— a man who presses his nose to the back of my head, who laughs quietly whenever I whirl around only to confront empty space. He casts no reflection. He never speaks. Who the fuck are you, I yell. Why are you doing this to me. Always at a steady pace, never sprinting, keeping my strength, I keep space between myself and my pursuer. I make sure to pass the lodge several times, the one that used to have the sign COMMUNITY SOUP KITCHEN draped over the doorway. I got a packet of sanitary pads there once; typical goods for the homeless. The woman who handed it over would not look at my face. I remember the foundation caked in her wrinkles. Now it is locked up. Frantic, I call for help a few times with no answer. I do not believe that no one is there. The solitary yellow window on the second floor winks out as soon as I rattle the door. I give up, trying to ignore the prickle at the back of my neck. But in the dark I feel the man gaining on me. I frequently slap myself across the face to stay awake. I wander the streets circuitously, in the cold and rain, until the sole of my left shoe is unglued and flapping, and my jean cuffs fray. When my bladder becomes a boulder I squat, timing myself. He always catches up.I fall asleep on my feet, head knocked back by a lamppost. The man touches my shoulders and my stomach swings like a hammock. Fuck off, I slur. I shrug out of my coat and jog into a crowd. Pedestrian eyes travel up the tracks on my arms. I haven’t slept in days! I scream at passers-by. I can hear the soft pad of footsteps behind me, not even struggling to keep up. His laugh. Somebody fucking help me!Limbs jostle me from all sides. The concrete sidewalk leaps up to smash my elbow. In the lodge there was a plaque praising community service above the kitchen entrance. I remember a penlight shining in my eyes, blurring the figures standing around me. My shirt was wet, sticking to the skin of my chest. The rank smell of vomit hung about me like a cloud. The voice of the woman wearing cakey foundation said, “these people are such animals.”Now, I’m in an empty hospital room. The only light is fluorescent. A poster to my left takes over the wall: Understanding the signs of addiction: we are here to help. The door slides open and a young PA with a tablet asks me how my elbow feels. I do not speak, because it is too late. I know I will not have his sympathy. I focus on my breath until he leaves. I finally feel that I am able to get up and stumble to the bathroom. To the mirror. And now you will leave me here, with the man blocking my way, as I cannot look around the back of his head. He stands here with elbows bent, shoulders rising and falling in the motion of tying a tie. I, doomed to occupy the space of a shadow, cast out and grasping for the physicality I’ve lost— I am disgusting to you. As days lengthen to weeks you’ll forget my pathetic begging. Smile, and, smugly, tell yourself that everything is how it should be, of course. Nothing is the matter.You’ll make way for him.You’ll call him sir.
January 6, 2025
by Mike Topp
$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″
Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.
–Sparrow
