A short, dystopian story about a future we're all being sold. Alone, the last salesman sits. The revolver’s weight more noticeable than any sample case he’d ever hauled across the American expanse. After fifty years of roads, millions of miles woven into the fiber of his being, it is here, in this dead hilltown motel where his thread will be cut and the weaving will end. Fuzzy mildew crawls up the walls in reaching, black tendrils, branching off like the poisoned veins of all

A poem about a confluence of events He was twenty-five, a messed-up kid in man-sized Doc Martens thudding the splintered sidewalks of East Carson Street, back when July nights in Pittsburgh still smelled faintly like steel mills and catfish piss and not yuppie money, his Polo shirt half-unbuttoned, two steady streams of sweat dribbling down his neck and meeting at a confluence that ran down his chest. The first stop, like always, Jack’s, his favorite dive where the doorman n

A short story of escape, survival, and unburdening. North, he walks. Sun to his left, falling over Georgia like a weary eyelid. He leaves behind a city, a woman, and a child whom he loves but who do not love him back. He travels forward without the regret and guilt he shouldered for a decade, following a path—and a bird—back toward a beginning that left grisly scars across his cheek and brow: cruel brandings placed there by the rusted edge of the coal shovel his father brough

Overcoming fear and loathing in an ancient place of healing Monday. Late March, the first real, warm breath of spring morning licking the Ouachita ridges like a lover who might still turn cold by nightfall. I sputtered into Hot Springs, Arkansas, in my dented Chevy pickup smelling like cigarettes and a decade of regret, my joints stiff from the long haul out of the frozen Midwest where my life had finally shit the bed for good. Thirty-eight years old. A thousand rejected poem