B(Earth)day
Matthew Schmidt
I’m shoving fat candles into dirt,
blowtorching the wicks and tooting
horns.
I couldn’t render enough tallow
to properly honor over 4 billion years,
sorry,
you have so many hills.
I won’t apologize for trying to forget the days I spent with you, riding pillion on your Honda, inhaling Bombay’s foggy polluted streets, sitting on rickety wooden benches of hole-in-the-wall Indo-Chinese joints, slurping Szechwan noodles and sipping Tom Yum soup, strolling on Juhu’s wet sandy beaches, letting the ocean wash our feet.
Two weeks after the scientist’s freak exposure, a man in black arrived at his front step. It was the weekend, and the man in black brought with him a gift: a jumble of neon material he removed from
The goal of short fiction is up for debate, but it seems to me that, if a story has a single job, it is to subvert the expectations of the reader.
I’m shoving fat candles into dirt,
blowtorching the wicks and tooting
horns.
I couldn’t render enough tallow
to properly honor over 4 billion years,
sorry,
you have so many hills.
I make him coffee, I make hot chocolate for his kids, and sometimes I buy his weed.
The cousin had called my thesis advisor and said something like, “Hey, film professor cousin, can you do this film for us?” and my thesis advisor was like, “Hey, no. But I know a guy who is still unemployed four months after graduation and is about to get evicted.”
Or more specifically its monster, long tail whisper in our swimming pool: in a valley girl’s mind.
He started as a single Clay Aiken, the one we all knew with the smiling face and aw-shucks demeanor
If this were paint it’d be asymptotic, red.
A girl on my train is watching Kylie Jenner’s snapchat. I lean in and watch over her shoulder. I can't hear, but it doesn't really matter.
I found out I was pregnant in the bathroom of a wine bar.
Too many toasties cut in quarters for Subway. Too many indemnity claims at Allstate.
It’s clear that most of these students hate Sal, Dean, and Kerouac.
If you’re wanting to write a poem that will appeal to the largest possible amount of people, you really can’t go wrong writing a poem about water.
There is an eerie glow to the hollowness of bark that has been stripped of its leaves and fruit
I try to turn everything into a metaphor so I don’t have to face it straight on.
When was the last time she ran? At all? As a real kid in bare feet in grass at her grandparents’ house.
At least I was alone, I tell myself. There’s no one to miss the worlds I destroy but me.