My Cardboard Balcony

Hot Pockets Lined the Shelves by Belinda Roddie Hot pockets lined the shelves and cabinets in Vincent's kitchen as he set up plates and napkins while his college friends made bets on who would win the football games, their baits a couple hundred in cash, near enough to see Bruce Springsteen on the twenty-fifth of April. As Vincent began to sup, his friends roared at the touchdown just scored. Miffed at the fact that his hot pocket still had not thawed out fully, he stuck it back in the microwave for two more minutes. Chad beckoned for him to sit right between him and Jordan. Vincent couldn't help a smile. He hadn't spent time with friends for a while.

Make a splash at the party tonight! Wear a tight red dress! Paint your lips with bubble gum! Sew new lashes into your eyelids! Pull back your hair! Mutilate your scalp! Stab your ears! Then put on those killer (literally) heels and waltz right into that cramped living room. The Smirnoff is just waiting for your sweet kiss.

Hitched Abridging by Belinda Roddie hitched abridging misfits sitting at a turntable drinking coffee from a funnel tumbling through wordplay a tinkerbelle-like mannequin is playing with a toy ball that bounces on the finish line of g.i. joe toys' marathon disenchanted souvenirs of old forgotten juveneers (a cross of buccaneers and juveniles, if you don't get it) but the pictures in their heads are much more vivid when they talk about them not when they pick up a paintbrush 'cause the apricot tones are too dull

We capture small children every day. Some are black and some are white. Some are skinny and some are fat. The fat ones are good for cannon fodder. We put them in the tanks and wheel them onto the field. People say we're sick, but we know there's a war to be won. The adults won't fight. We need the children. They have the passion in their hearts. But then someone calls me devil and I don't understand why. Am I devil? Or am I messiah for making these kids fight for the cause?

Think Fast by Belinda Roddie if two trains loaded with TNT come barreling at 1,000 miles per minute toward your little hybrid shelter that just stalled along the old, old railroad tracks, at what time will they both reach velocity to split your skull into over 1,000 little pieces?

The catcher of the baseball team was reading Catcher in the Rye in the locker room while his son hung a dreamcatcher in his bedroom about two hundred miles away. If the catcher looked really hard at the pages of his book, he could catch a glimpse or smudges on the print. Meanwhile, his son was catching up with his homework and watching the feathers of his new decoration dance against the light breeze caught from his bedroom window.

A Pair Of by Belinda Roddie Irish cream to cool a swollen pair of adenoids - a cloth to cool a swollen pair of brain lobes, pulsing back and forth like pong on a jaded game console, which knobs are barely working after twenty years of loneliness. Painkillers to serve as tiny red cherries on the sundae that marks a symptom-free weekend until the next time panic rolls around and I start worrying that the same thing will happen again.