Bringing stained fingertips
to lips with an unformed question
at my center about what now
I might call grace
The discussion of the two couples had shifted to immigration and the southern border wall. Tom, of course, had the sharpest and loudest opinion. Something about the country being overrun by illegal immigrants, all of them welfare moochers who belonged in jail. Heads in the booth bobbed in agreement. The only objection was a mild one—-“Lower your voice, Tom,” one of the women said.
He asked why she was crying, and she just shrugged and said, “It’s a sad song.” They didn’t speak again about it. He held her hand and she laid her head on his shoulder. He used to love the back rooms in parties – a secret party within a party, where people could speak and smoke, and it felt exclusive.
Wayne pours soy sauce in his ramen and scrunches up his nose as he takes a sip. He dumps the bowl into the bag-lined garbage can, broth and noodles splatting against the bottom of the bin.
“Families,” Pastor Evan once said, “are God’s greatest gift to the world. The secular world is full of unhappy people. Look at their divorce rates. It’s because women aren’t meant to work. They are meant to take care of the home. It’s not in their nature. Men were hunters, women were gatherers. It was that way for a reason.” I remember my head was throbbing and my mouth got all dried up.
Except she wasn’t looking. Here, blood was trickling like rust from a spigot, and my mother couldn’t be bothered to see it. We’d already made our way down one aisle and now we were making our way down another. But the blood went unnoticed because something else seized her attention. Something that wasn’t just pulling her along through the aisles, but pulling her away from me, from this moment.
FILM / Teen Wolf—An Apology / Logan Silva
The denizens of the United States have long been accused of being culturally deprived. We are starving, lacking an appreciation of the fine art of mime, Goethe and weinershnitzel. Nothing proves this point as well as the jeremiads delivered on the movie Teen Wolf, first released in 1985, starring a young Michael J. Fox. I offer this apology (in the formal sense), laying forth the visionary nature of the film.
Where I said farewell to a little girl
When next month I will greet a young woman
Who, when I wasn’t looking,
When I wasn’t allowed to look
Lost the last vestiges
Of soft and round and sweet
if I do this | for real this time | there will be nothing left of him | just dirt on parchment & those canyon eyes | all the things we would do if we knew better way back when
By and by the daylight journeys by,
adds another stone to praise the spring. An altar
says my grandfather, is a remembering thing,
what Moses built when he saw into Canaan
I needn’t this cage around my heart
if you will try to beat it anyway.
I’ll instead bind the bars
And make you forget
So you do not regret
Because I don’t, really.
He looked past Elise, toward his creation in the fireplace. Flames climbed toward the flue and reached for air, and he grew preoccupied with the notion that he would be tossed in with the logs and reduced to ash for the good of the fire.
Or this backyard: lawn blending seamlessly into forest,
dappled light on the stream in the distance, cultivated wildness
of an English garden. Here you could be the kind of person
who spreads an antique quilt to read Tolstoy among the rosebushes,
the only person in bookclub who made it all the way through
I noticed the light would often be on in 1-D's sunroom, but the blinds stayed shut. One time, while I was sitting out on the patio reading, I caught 1-D's patio door open ever so slightly, and a hand (which I correctly guessed to be a woman's) stuck out as if to check the temperature. When I turned to look over, the hand retreated, and the door slammed fast but gently enough to keep the blinds motionless.
The street was vaguely lit; some stores had signs that blinked, and the neon lights flooded the street. Small rainbows glistened over the water drains, slick and black. The meows of an orange calico cat flooded our ears and then its tail rubbed up against John’s pants.
FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / January 2023 / Gabriel Ricard
Gabe thinks 2022 was a good year for cinema in this month’s Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo.
FILM / A Hard Heart Kills / Myle Yan Tay
I avoided Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” for years, knowing that it was about the individual experience of being in the military. I knew it was about the Vietnam War and the ensuing cruelty. I knew it was split into two parts, the first part depicting Marine Corps training and the second part in Vietnam itself. And I knew, having served two years in the Singapore Armed Forces, that those topics are rarely things I’m in the mood to watch.