Beneath a gazebo, wearing a canary housedress, her matted hair having outlived numerous stylists, an old woman catalogs the skeletons of her lifetime. Joining her on the short arm of an L-shaped bench, I ask, “You got somebody here?” “They’re all spread out.” She gestures …
The hotel concierge was kind enough to point me in the right direction. Despite the concept that I believed all roads were connected, I have been turned around more than once in the city. I took an early train from upstate, had arrived early enough …
One With a gulp, the lake swallows us up. I hold my breath, feeling our bodies sink. His is the heavier, dragging us both down, pulling us towards the tangled weeds underneath. I hold fast to his belt-strap, my fist straining to keep a grip …
The woman seated across from me resembled a series of geometric shapes, painted in primary colours—red, yellow, blue—and floating around each other as if suspended in air. The fruits of light and shade, perhaps. Or more correctly, the space-cake—somehow maintained in one piece on the …
I am sitting at the table in a cheap hotel off Conz Street. There is football on the TV, but I do not know who’s playing. I have taken all the money out of our bank account and talked my way into a hotel …
Go and get the mail, I am reminded. It’s nothing more than what he tells me every day, his words are not meant to annoy, but they do. I bundle up to go outside, angry at this chore but outside I suddenly realize spring seems …
No GPS. No phones. No data. Just maps, and notebooks and silent moments between here and there. Heading into the unknown: motorcycle leathers and an open road. I’ll hold you close. Don’t worry about holding too tightly, you say, and it’s okay if you bump …
I devour dialogues of sunset dwellers, the romantics sprawled on canvas loungers overlooking South Harbor. A turquoise pool ripples between the Baltic and us. X-girls chorus, “Yo, yo,” sipping wine and Estonian beer. White lights strung through the railing glow strong after my third drink. …
Spray us yellow so that we stand out from the red hotels claiming Gamla Stan. We were the second boarding house to hang a vacancy sign, and that first one went kaput before the Great War. A single bomb struck during WWII, shattering windows …
Jacky says the perfect country song has to be about a truck and someone who’s gotten hurt. It has to have at least one line about beer and talk about the current lives of old high-school friends. “A real country song has to be sad,” …