dormant details shaking sense You open your eyes with foreign disorientation. Beside you is someone you loved a very long time ago. The fact that you loved them isn’t on your mind - it’s the way that you loved them. You loved this person in a new way when they told you to never wear lipstick because ‘…your mouth is too beautiful to be covered with anything except for my lips.’ And when you kissed, it was like swallowing sky. Trying to...
the prettiest girl of all Claudia is one of those hip girls with the right words and the right blood. Bank account blood that buys her big shoes and pays for her expensive apartment. Blood that gives you blonde hair and a straight nose. Thin thighs and slate blue eyes. Claudia and Claude have been fucking on and off for three years. In the beginning they joked about the closeness of their names while they blew rails off a glass top coffee table...
“Don’t drink today,” says Charlie. His left hand connects with my ass in three ways. Slap. Grab. Shove. A gust of air-conditioning sails from the Lex and 43rd entrance to Grand Central Station. It cools my blush. Charlie and I exchange “God bless” knowing we’ll never see each other again. We met ten minutes ago on the corner of 54th and 5th. “Are you Jewish or Italian?” asked a 5’2” Puerto Rican stranger while I stood waiting...
He’s the sort of character that makes your pupils dilate. My black hole gaze is tracing the shift of his shoulders and sway of his hips as his expression of nearness rapidly unveils. Perched on my Bleeker Street stoop I’m pretending not to see him, even though I’ve been sitting here waiting for 37 minutes. That makes me 17 minutes early and him 20 minutes late. If I hadn’t patiently passed 29 years in quiet confidence that childhood...
There’s a force between them, a push that moves him outside and her within. It’s in the way she teaches him to remember - how he shows her to forget. His eyes are grey and indigo - the way a storm’s sky might appear swallowed by shallow salt water; blue the way she was the first day he first appeared. Two shades like her affection for life; fading pink on the surface - scarlet in the place that only he can see. And it’s only getting...