My Cardboard Balcony

Insomnia by Belinda Roddie In this moment, I remember: Jesus's leaking body on plywood, the twenty-three odd stab wounds engraved like signatures in Caesar's vessel. Only seven more, and it would have been thirty, a nice even number, pretend stigmata so the dictator-for-life could have played a messiah as well as a martyr. There are scuffs and divots from blunt knives, from blunt nails, on every wall, in every corner, on every metal stovetop heaving hot breaths, heaving coarse breaths, waiting for the fire to be put out. It's too much for their mouths; they want water, they want wine, they want cold steel against their teeth. In this moment, I remember: The night you nearly pushed me into traffic. The night you landed a blow on the most curved part of my back, and in an instant, I became concave - a lens to see the world differently with, bent frames and buried fingernails in denim pockets. You claimed you didn't mean to hurt me, but the bru

It wasn't that Marsha was looking to be competitive; it's that she was good at everything. At lacrosse, at track and field, at math, at English, at trombone, at chess, at Sudoku. She could even make a Sunday crossword with her mom feel like a rivalry-oriented ordeal. She couldn't help it; it was simply in her blood to work her ass off to do well. And do well she did, all the way until she turned twenty-five, and she didn't hear the train whistling one drunken night on the tracks because she was too good at being inebriated.