My Cardboard Balcony

Caught You by Belinda Roddie Caught you sneaking out back with a dry ice martini, sucking the chill out of a sieve and wishing you were dreaming about orangutans playing ping pong with the Senate, but the sad thing with that image is that we're already in it. Saddle up with your white steed, driving the carriage to the liquor store where you'll restart your next sacred marriage with an Elvis hallucination kept in the corner of a refrigerator, scheming up cocktails in a warehouse of machinery. You'll smoke and drink until you're sick, coughing up lugnuts until your axles stop turning and you're too comatose for mugshots, but the unhinged smile is a nice touch when your innards become dismantled, and your horsepower goes under and your engine blows to embers. So, yes, I caught you, and I don't know what to do with you, and I don't know what to say to you, except suck on the curly straw a bit for you and take away the crunch of a

The entire town had suffered an enormous calamity when the earthquake struck. The mayor had been killed in a massive pile up of bricks in the should-be condemned town hall. His wife, a widow, ran for mayor soon afterward, but the tone of the entire town was off-kilter. People cried on their way to the grocery store, which still sat amidst the residue of catastrophe-induced rubble. Even dogs whined more often. And I sat alone in my now ramshackle house with no one to hold me in bed.