My Cardboard Balcony

Six O'Clock by Belinda Roddie Father had a shaky grip on the pickle jar, and when he dropped it, the brine exploded in a big, brown-yellow fountain. I tried to clean up the glass, but he wouldn't let me because I was barefoot and he was wearing boots. Upstairs, my sister was having sex with an older man who had celebrated his birthday yesterday with her in Berkeley. They had gone to a Thai restaurant and made fun of the waitress's hair and accent. And no one talked about my brother, who lay near catatonic on the couch with the TV bellowing, a bag of potato chips on the floor and a large capsule of painkillers in the crook of his arm.

The flood of words was like watching a spurt of ink or oil splashing out of the prisoner's mouth. He was flailing his arms, screeching, eyes bulging outward and threatening to erupt from his eroding sockets. I could see the outline of his jaw in his gaunt face, how it creaked when he talked. "I'm an innocent man, and I will say that until I die in a ditch!" he screamed as the guards dragged him away from clawing at my new uniform.

Our Hometown by Belinda Roddie the house by the 5th and A intersection used to be a mental institute. if you walk by, you can smell weed, urine, and silent screams. a cage is just a gate that bars you from heaven, and wooden instruments save more lives than metal ones do. we all look suspiciously young, redheaded, and nosy. We're loud and we eat crackers in between meals. and if one of us ever became president of the United States, you can bet he would say, "that old house should be turned into a pizza place."

When the dusk had shrugged off its rosy cowl and nestled itself within the blue beard of night, I rode my motorcycle to the corner of Park and Baker and waited by the small general store sitting by the intersection. It was cold and I drew my coat closer to me, my breath freezing on my visor. My father was meant to meet me here, ragged and gray and just as I expected him to. But it had been six minutes already past nine and he was nowhere to be seen.

Royal Court by Belinda Roddie bring me the disenchanted jester who stumbles on his heels and fumbles with the criss-cross of hyper phrases thick as fire and strong as whiskey. I want him to sing me a dream-caught fantasy that I've saved in my dresser drawer all mottled with cobwebs and muddled with dust and with pepper scalding his tongue and spice spraying ever outward, all while the bells on his cap scream help us please we're nothing but pretty he will bring reds and blues to my mostly swollen black and pale purple afternoons.

There once was a boy who literally stole people's thunder. Everyone in town had a jar of thunder, unscrewing the cap just a little each night to let the percussion rumble beneath their feet. It was so they could be spooked and get blood pumping through their veins and feel the cold adrenaline begin to warm up like bubbles on top of a thin broth. But the boy stole it all, sucking it through a tube into a large glass container, lit up by the night sky as it rained.

Everyone had some kind of scar. Red or black or brown. On their arms, their legs, their faces. It was a sign of the illness. A sign that they had been infected. Like a large scab that poisoned everything beneath the skin that was meant to protect us. I was off for a cure. My scar ran from my forehead all the way down the left side of my jaw. I looked like a warrior. I felt like a doomed child.