Michael Seymour Blake is the author of the art book 12 Days of Santa Crying. Shirts featuring his art can be seen on hot bodies around the world. He eats, sleeps, doodles, writes, lives in Queens, NY. He easily gets lost. Instagram: @michaelseymourblake Fabulous (It’s True!) Website: MichaelSeymourBlake.com
The waters are synchronized. There is a decanter of coffee fuming. Grandma is sad. Eating pizza, strangely. Songs are playing, strangely, and I catch one directly above the table we are at in this separate room (but all the doors were open, so it was more like a section of a bigger room, like a house is a room with sections of itself). My grandma, aunt, grandpa, my Uncle Bobby are all sitting here, with a few other people and pastries that are covered that I’m told to eat but confused to because they are not eaten. Pizza boxes were
1. On their second date, he will wear a shirt half tucked in, un-ironed, rolled up to the elbows. She’ll see the various tattoos on his arms but the one of a peony will be the one that confirms where she goes that night. “I went home w/ W,” she will text a friend, but the message will not go through, and so the next morning, she will imagine she might have imagined the whole thing. He will take them back to his house on J Street. He will still smell of saffron and garlic. Her family will still not
There is not yet a ghost in this place, but there will be. A long time ago there was a school, then another school, and then different offices. I lived in a house with an upstairs and a downstairs, a basement and an attic. We were a family. I was a girl. This is what I remember, not what I imagine. Although nothing can be verified without a living body, here with me, to speak and either object or affirm. Then, I was always in an act. Of laughing, talking, dancing. There were others around me, other girls, and we
The composer used his Guggenheim and several other grants for the purchase of twelve children. Pitching for conditioned octave he specified three teens with tinsel, flinty, and flintiest timbres, five prepubescent boys whose vocal chords had rashes of uniquely layered crackle, and four soprano toddlers of separately valued screech. His house’s twelve TV rooms were built for private occupancy. In one the tube was empty and the toddler hit the screen. Enacted blurs of violence against the reflective surface. Posing afterwards flexed muscles, elbows out-crotched biceps straining. Kissing a mirage of Barbie while she lasted hand-lined in the air. The
Michael Seymour Blake is the author of the art book 12 Days of Santa Crying. Shirts featuring his art can be seen on hot bodies around the world. He eats, sleeps, doodles, writes, lives in Queens, NY. He easily gets lost. Instagram: @michaelseymourblake Fabulous (It’s True!) Website: MichaelSeymourBlake.com
Liv’s mother called, but Liv’s mother always called. I imagined her eggshell sheets on what would soon be her deathbed, the waxy fake ferns in the corner of the nursing home room. I imagined her bloated face on her dead body, as waxy as the fake plants. Disgusting. The aides were the ones who actually called. They would hold the phone up to her mother’s cheek, and she’d huff into the receiver about how she missed her daughter and how she should come visit. She was always out of breath. Liv would listen to the messages, then delete them without
When I can’t think of what to do, I have no choice but to go fast. I grab my car keys from under a pile of crumpled receipts by the door. I’d throw them out, but what if I need them someday? I could be audited. I could need an alibi. I focus back on the keys. It’s important to avoid rabbit holes. I can feel my tongue in my mouth. It’s time to go. I get in my car and fly out of my condo development’s parking lot in reverse and swing forward towards the ramp to I-295. It’s
We hold hands and listen to him read our vows, grey mustache puffing above his breath. I picture him sucking a cigarette outside, a Bible tucked to his body, white robe blowing in the wind. Behind us, my mother’s arms hang from the hospital gown, her limp limbs our altar. Her eyes closed, two still coins. Our daughter keeps grabbing the wires. We unclasp our hands again and again. Stop it, we angry whisper. Come back. The beeps are steady, at least. Her moans have subsided, at least. Yes, I will take him, at least in sickness, at most in health. Her
“If anyone sees that he can live better on the gallows than at his own table, he would be very foolish not to go and hang himself.” —Baruch Spinoza for Kit Schluter Another party, and the people who go to them. My former boss, whom I distrust on a fundamental level, invited me to his retirement party held at his vacation home on the coast. He hadn’t used it since the summer. At first, when invited, I said no. I had to wash my hair that night. But later, as so often is the case, I said yes. I