1. 77‑Y.O’s New [Perhaps Clichéd] Organizing Principle
Understanding
Life’s entropy
State
After
Making trek
Higher up into
Age’s
Himalayas
Where near air gets
Understanding
Life’s entropy
State
After
Making trek
Higher up into
Age’s
Himalayas
Where near air gets
As a defensive measure, Cullen had taped garbage bags to his windows. Black ones. Double layered. He’d been awake since Tuesday. Hadn’t left the house since Friday.
He told me all this in a calm voice. Maybe a little amused
Dandelions rocketed up
from sidewalk cracks,
joyous, unrestrained,
seeds of sunlight in
fields of quiet.
And the fish multiplied
exponentially, like
God promised in some
irrational book
of ancient fiction.
~
A message for the horse-faced boys and girls
I missed the bus to Tapachula by 15 minutes. There wouldn’t be another until the following morning, the robotic woman at the ticket counter told me. I was trying to cross before dark, remembering the frightening scene at
I was just off my valet shift, 3 a.m., and I’d gone to a pancake house. This was in L.A., forty years ago. An old man landed in my booth, ka-thud.
He was one of the most famous movie actors of all time.
I didn’t
A boy loved a girl, and when he could no longer live with his secret, he reached into his chest and pulled out his heart. The task wasn’t easy, the crack of bone, the cleaving of meat and tendons. The heart lay in his hands,
It’s a zoo without obvious cages, the animals running wild. People warned to stay in their cars, keep the windows up. But the lions are sleepy – one falls like a sack in the grass. It’s the antelope who watch us through
On a brisk, windy Friday night I’m standing outside a resort hotel’s entrance where Betsy and I have just had dinner, waiting for the valet to bring our car around, Betsy inside away from the wind, all three lanes jammed
NWWQ invites submissions in the first two weeks of Jan, April, July and October and publishes in those same months.
Many thanks to all who submitted to the October issue.
We watch something burn until we notice it’s our apartment. It’s where we’ve been living for the past few hours. Fortunately that means most of our stuff is still boxed up in the truck. No skin off our backs. We’re out on the sidewalk.
To break down is what we’re designed for. Lungs, language, elevators. A person can only climb seven floors before they grow old, before extinction, and it’s me they call. Shaman, doctor, repair man. An elevator is a machine
Randall Morgan preferred to sit in the back row, whether it be
in airplanes, cars, even the mega-whopper-daredevil roller coaster at the
Little Heaven amusement park. He was a cool player, didn’t say much,
We were driving across country back to Denver and lost Odie’s leash. He needed to go for a walk and was young then and would run off. I pulled over at a Love’s Truck Stop in the middle of nowhere Kansas thinking they might
We had spent many hours watching people talk on the T.V.
Well, Joan said. So we drove back.
The hills were down to the earth. Each was a bare dirt heap, or a complicated geological jut.
The trees—which we had known and liked
The meat in the pool—
The rodent pecks the cat—
The cat bleeds the bird—
The bird drinks the dew—
We’ve all seen this episode before.
The cookie is red, the cookie is blue.
The meat is actually bread.
The bread’s beet red.
Red
If you speak of me, I’ll be sneezing. The devil
is spoken for, and so am I. Each gossip, each
rumor: if only it were true. Usually no one
cares enough about me to say anything, kind
or cruel. Since I sneeze so many times in
English, cockney at that, the squadron of children are killers with their foreign tongues. A new school for the American… At seven, she understands scarcely a word of what they say.
The man in the black suit is her father.
a four-story brick hotel
at 90 Alexander Street in Gastown,
the original settlement
and oldest part of the city,
close to the Port of Vancouver,
was built in 1905
to serve the itinerant male populations
Went down the Colorado River, got out and camped along the way. A two-person tent for the group wasn’t large enough, so instead, we stored all our belongings inside the tent, electing to sleep out under the stars. Our bodies
It was a slow day at the hotel. I kept checking my walkie-talkie to make sure it was on. I went down to the laundry room.
“What’s up Mr. Moneybags,” Olivia said. She thought it was fucked up I got tips for doing a job