My Cardboard Balcony

English Toffee Teeth by Belinda Roddie Old man glues his hand to the sidewalk, frees himself and leaves two fingers behind. On the pavement, they grow soft and sticky, like good old English Toffee, the crunchy dirt substituting for almonds. People leave pieces of themselves all over the the city, and the walls of townhouses, too, oozing rhymes from separated ears that they plucked from their skulls to slap onto alabaster. They want to eavesdrop on their neighbors and see if their husbands and wives are having sex in a tiny bedroom with a little car parked just beneath their window.

"It's just a bruise. Nothing major." "Nothing major, my ass. Let me look." It was a bruise, all right. A super bruise. Unnatural. This wasn't the kind of purple swelling patch of flesh you'd get from a fall or an accidental blow. This was intentional. I gingerly held onto the boy's fingers and squeezed them. "You can tell me what happened." "Nothing did." "Charles," I insisted. "I'm not buying that you're okay."

Stress Reducer by Belinda Roddie Cotton amber fireflies soothing a lemon tongue can do wonders for a seven-track CD brain with the laser caught on a stain and skipping the same three notes over and over and over again, the ice synchronizing in your lungs, swimming pool full of warm pudding to dip your swollen knots into, the twists loosening like a corkscrew pulling out cheap residue from a cheap vial. The TV is not willing to shut off, so you mute it and ignore the shrieking Picasso mouths stretched out into bubblegum snaps and offer a spray of vintage relaxation to a friend. Hopscotch with hot scotch, cool running with cool rum, clam chowder appetizer and a fall to the plush with your toes against the ottoman, pushing you into daylight before night's even done. The sparks are crispy on your gums. Chew them. Spit them out like liquid firecrackers, watch them burn up into red ash. Commit to the wing ding font of your living room, where your brother i...

We are meant teach our children to become better than we were. Plain and simple. But we as mentors do not like being defeated by the students. We hold a sense of superiority in regards to our knowledge and our experience, preferring to become stingy with the information we have gathered or concluded upon without sharing it with the younger population. But the truth to wisdom is that wisdom is shared, passed along like a hot mug or an embrace, to allow peace and stability to a young heart that will lead us to new dynasties.

Some Guy by Belinda Roddie Some Guy spilled gunpowder all over Parliament some pocketful of years ago, and thanks to technicolor commentary in fancy-wrapped books read by disillusioned adolescents, it's suddenly a big thing. Though really, it all comes down to disobedience in a violently shaken martini, distributed unevenly amid the thirsty populace, and as a result, some get the olive, while others get all the alcohol in their veins where they become sluggish and numb, so numb, with the needle playing in the grooves of their vinyl bones, bending them into anthems, warping them in the sun, begging them to follow a message. Get me a typewriter: I'll write you a fucking mantra. I'll duct tape it onto telephone poles because I don't do staplers, and I'll go Banksy on your blood and spray paint your central nervous system on the walls of your small business, and you'll take it to be a gold artery in your mine of whimsical ideas, thinki...

Flat on the ground, my chin was in the grass. You were sitting on top of me, pinning my shoulders together, giggling like a maniac. I could barely breathe, and it made him worse that I was laughing and hiccuping and most likely turning sixteen different shades of purple. "Okay. Get off. Get off get off get off get off get oooooff." The air rushes back into my chest as you roll beside me, clinging to my hands on the way down.

"I'm inadequate. I'm not much use to anyone." "Don't say that." He shakes his head. "I'm not backtracking. It's true." "You're use to people! You're use to me. And what does it matter how 'useful' you are? Fuck people. You don't have to be 'useful.' You're not a cellphone. You're not a computer. You're a person. And you don't need others to evaluate how much you contribute."