My Cardboard Balcony

Spiders Know No Season by Belinda Roddie Spiders know no season, though they do indeed weave summer tapestries and modern mosaics on autumn leaves. They string springtime shelters before they make vacation homes by the sea. A bit of silver lining never hurt a tree or wall or corner in a barn or near the canopy. Then when winter cobwebs droop their shaggy beards, the patterned eyes weep pearls. Spiders don't mind the cold. It keeps them strong.

I didn't see anything at first as I crouched by the small basement window and peered out. Then I saw feet. Lots of them. Many of them were sheltered by low-top converses, mostly purples and blacks and blues. I had to get out there somehow, so I tapped feverishly on the pane and hoped someone would notice. The door was glued shut nearby. Ultimately I saw a face instead of a foot soon enough.

There's something delightfully bizarre about passcodes, the way they confuse someone made of skin and bones rather than circuits or wires or bot -ness, for lack of a better word. It's the result of an off-chance prediction that maybe we are simply the face of a monitor smirking at the possibility of selling Viagra or crowning ourselves Nigerian Princes on someone's Facebook account. It's reasonable enough, a passcode, but the words themselves could be so much like a convoluted stream of water mixed with salt. Not like the sea, though. That's too generic. So I decided it'd be best to string together these brain bubbling phrases like beads of different sizes and shapes on a gold thread. The end product may be a bit... strange. But experimentation, if done with a good heart, can create...well, a chaotic mess of language. But isn't that what poetry is, anyway? Because you call Geedei by his proper name. And you are unegic (not) when you...

"So you're twenty-two now?" "Twenty-three." He passed me another bottle of Full Moon. We sat alone together on the blunter edge of a fence overlooking the lot. The grocery store sat empty on our left. The Jack in the Box was on our right. "You could've gone out with other people, you know," he said to me. "I know," I replied, taking a sip of beer. "I didn't want to."

There was a lot of time for me to think in my last year of university. Everything became an anxiety during those months, when textbooks grew heavier on my shoulders and essays grew longer. I began to wonder about things...strange things. Like whether or not I'd grow horns from my head. Or if the Soviet Union would return. I've heard from my grandfather, when he's drunk, that those are the beginning signs that you're a conspiracy theorist.

by Belinda Roddie "A one legged Jedi walks into a bar..." "Oh, no." "He comes up to the bar and he asks the barkeep for a hot chocolate..." "No, stop. Drake, shut him up before it's too late." "Why, is it that serious?" asks Drake, his smile glowing silver behind his glass of amber. I can't help chuckling at my friends' typical antics. Peter has been trying to tell a "timeless" joke of his to the gang while the tired-eyed bartender passes me another pint of Smithwick's. The froth is still sparkling on my lips as I cast my vision on the gorgeous Áine, who's feigning utmost panic while clutching her Heineken bottle to her chest. "I'm telling you, it's a disaster. This pub will crumble from the sheer dreadfulness of his joke. Thousands will cower amid the rubble! The punchline uses bone humor, for God's sake! Bone humor!" "Hey, I didn't make it up," Peter mu...

How many were dead? I didn't know. They all seemed to become one mass on the television screen. The way the camera hovered over them was like the cameraman was expecting someone to jump up and go, "KIDDING!" But no one did. It wasn't a game show. It wasn't a reality show. This was real. And we were watching it like a poor kid's entertainment while the gunman laughed his ass off.