center

Someone you once knew and who no longer speaks to you 
is sleeping on your front stoop.  Tiny particles of his body 
 
blow off in the wind and tiny particles of his body constantly 
blow back.  He seems in no hurry to leave, no hurry to stay. 

Dizzied and calmed, Justin resized the browser window and opened a new one, arranging them side-by-side. He began shopping for Stingray Corvettes with one eye while monitoring the pump.fun dashboard with the other.

Don’t wave your sanitized rainbow at me.
I am a child of the ’80s.
I remember our brothers
dying in hospital beds alone,
partners kept out in waiting rooms
like strangers,

Though each year's spring may be the last for us,
We take our comfort driving side by side,
And opt to greet each season without fuss
As we have done for decades, groom and bride.

Borgia showed every perversity of the Pope and his brood. There was brother-sister incest. The Pope himself had the grossest sexual desire (unrequited) for Lucrezia.

“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” So begins Slaughter House Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death.

Being able to spot lie after lie after lie: it’s continual, endless, like being used and craved as someone else’s drug. Every other sentence is now an insult, and the friendship has turned to ash.

The first warning is when she responds with questions in response to statements. The first time it had happened, I’d answered them patiently, even though her tone was strange—frankly it was rude and detached, with the trappings of analytics covering a core of malice.

That this desire, this guilt-sway of your hips, was put in its proper place among the centuries, the galaxies, among all those who have ever died. Strikingly alive.

the commentator’s mouth still moves,
silent now,
a mime of authority.
a mother’s scream clipped mid-syllable.