In Portland we find blown out cartoon roses on all the garbage trucks and sewer grates. We make a game of it. We find them in the beer labels and embossed redundantly across the toilet paper. They’re in outline on the bartender’s neck, too. We keep saying how nice it…

He inhaled the gospel, but when he exhaled, it came out in fragments, raggedy edges, brown splotches for while it was inside him, the gospel faltered and tore and skittered to the fearsome blather that passed for religion in this end-of-the-world town of dried yellow fields and blue scuffed skies. And he took it upon himself…

At three o’clock there’s nothing to do, nothing but the metal-on-metal of memory clanging the nerve chain to his brain with each heartbeat. Outside the trees are sweating in foliage the color of limes and emeralds and inside John Amos Johnny is impatient to die. Outside bees wobble from clover…

You uber back from the library unsure whether to confess to your girlfriend that your father has died or to say nothing & pretend it was another day of research on your family tree. She barely looks up from her new book on the Anthropocene, & so you flip on Bravo, wanting the angry noise of reality…

Home. Who am I without it? The tilting desk chair in the upstairs bedroom, I sliced my kneecap on a nail sticking out of it running from something once. I bled so much. I saw bone. I think the scar is still there. The creaking steps leading to the basement…