My Cardboard Balcony

That Old Drunk by Belinda Roddie Loosen up your limbs with a drink or four. Steins up! Glasses full! Down crystalline shots to even up the mental score. You're not one to back down from a stupid challenge, not until you're expelling your intestines into the nearest cold, porcelain bowl. Steins down! Glasses drained! Your poor wife pulls your hair back and sings to you as your edible regrets of the day come pouring out in a stream-of-conscious Faulkner flow. Then it's back to the bar to write a check. Go home, and a bottle's waiting for you. Drink half of it and go to sleep. Sweet dreams! You won't remember how much she loves you when you wake up the next evening.

I traveled the world for seven years with only a wad of cash in my back pocket and a backpack full of photographs and writing journals. I stayed in hostels and tiny homes free of charge because the owners pitied me and thought I would stray into the abyss if they didn't reach out a hand. I was always known as the wayward daughter - unable to behave or remain in one place for very long. I tried to walk to the edge of the world, but there's no such thing, of course, so all I did was move in circles.

Literary Arousal by Belinda Roddie So much ecstasy can occur in the eleventh chapter of a book where two lovers intertwine and your fingers slip beneath your beltline, massaging the tender shadows beneath. The lips part: Tongue extended, breath short, little bubbles of sound only bursting once they make contact with the nearest window pane. Read on, my dear. Let your body shudder from the black and blue, the text leaving contusions on your hypothalamus. All light bursts from that cone, and with a smile, you flip the pages with warm and sticky hands.

No update on the OneWord website today. Oh, well!

Radial Tunnel Syndrome by Belinda Roddie To tie your nerves up in knots - to pinch them, like a garden hose, so that the circulation is reduced to a constricted trickle during an autumn drought. The fingers blessed by numbness caused by angels' hidden needles, just in time for the rising temperatures so that you don't feel the heat stroke caressing the sweaty crook of your arm.

How long has the queen been imprisoned? Seven years? Seventeen? Is there gray in her hair and wrinkles beneath her eyes, or is she still young and spry in a darkened cell? Has she been muted, or does she still sing? Her melodies and anthems are missed throughout the land. The king's been dead for too long now - how much longer until we get our true ruler back? I've stopped counting the days; I simply press my body up against the window nearest to the tower, hoping to hear a crescendo of music.

The speech was meant to be symbolic, but everyone took it literally. The real carnage started as soon as he said the word "carnage," which he claimed was a metaphor. But the metaphor had grown arms and legs, and it wielded a sharp ax and a butcher's cleaver and split the skulls of the rallygoers open like rotten fruit. Their innards spilled out, but only in a trickle - there wasn't much brain to begin with.