i. Fucking on the moldy leather couch, exhales drop clumsy from our mouths like apples blackened on the branch. In this version of heaven, I pull the stars down in fistfuls, fitful and soggy, let them rain down like cake. I tear at your body like it’s a rotting roof, like I might somehow reach through to sky. ii. I tried to plant a future in plastic rows like an alien crop but the spring days thrashed feral beneath me echoing You are nowhere to be found. iii. you were a river—I walked into you and the stones leapt from my pockets. I have since tried to crawl so far away from you, from whatever it is makes the blood skitter and pop like frying oil. This far north, the late June days bisect themselves, fading briefly along the brittlest perforation of dim amid a vast tide of brightness. v. Now that I’ve moved away, I wish I could convey to you how much I’ve grown to love the dirt pile that’s taken the place of a house up the road and the people who do not live there.
Laura Post is from New Jersey. She lives with her dog Esther in Athens, OH, where she is a PhD candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Ohio University. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Plume 9, New South, Barnstorm, The Moth Magazine, and elsewhere.
Featured Artwork:
Son de Catalunya
A.C. Koch is a teacher, writer and musician whose fiction has been published in Analog, Split/Lip, Puerto del Sol, Hobart and forthcoming in Fantasy & Science Fiction. His photos and cartoons have appeared in Mud Season Review, BurningWord, and Birdy. He lives in Denver and performs with Firstimers.