mat pringle
Office by Alex Penny
clean up on aisle 620
Heavy eyelids droop
from the heat
of a sticky
Florida
sun
Bad Memories by Robert Farkas
I don’t look down on casual drug use—
find it a bit obtuse, really—but,
I realize that I’m probably not cut out for it.
Gorged on years of DARE shit,
I find myself unable to participate in illicit activity,
finding solace in the brevity of,
“Not tonight. Maybe next week,”
knowing full well that “next week” isn’t coming.
Here sits a girl with a crooked smile. She watches intently as he peels back the thick layers of her defenses, penetrating the deepest reaches of her being with those gentle eyes. When he looks at her that way—with his softened gaze and his hands on his hips—it makes her melt a little bit around the edges. No, she’s not sure what she would like to order; she just keeps looking up at him, fumbling her words like an idiot. Her cheeks flush brilliant pink, and his nose crinkles with his widening grin. She pushes her glasses farther up her nose, wishing she didn’t seem like such a total dweeb.
When she looks back, he’s gone and her glass has been refilled.
It’s been years now, but whenever I think of you, I still feel it: the Pull. The way my chest tightens and my heart flutters violently and shoots up into my throat, threatening to explode from me—that’s it. It’s like you’re tugging at my marionette heart strings from all of those thousands of miles away, fisting the lot of them and yanking me out of reality, reeling me in. It aches in my gut and by reflex, I swallow it down, burying it under thick onion layers that wrap it up in a tight cocoon of hurt and denial. It settles in the farthest, darkest corners of my mind, where it will fester until the next time I remember its presence and the Pull rears its ugly head once more.
