My Cardboard Balcony

I Quit by Belinda Roddie You built your own board game out of paper and random plastic tokens that you scrounged from the bottom of every desk drawer. You made up the rules and changed them whenever you were losing, crying, "No fair!" when anyone upped the ante. Somehow, after each death rattle of the dice, the energy was sucked out of the room. So your friends abandoned you to drink beer and play video games with your much cooler father, and you still don't understand why.

At the Jelly Fang concert, Chris and Neil each took two tabs: One pink, and one green. The pink pill would relax the muscles in the arms and legs, while the green pill would stimulate the heart and head. Without minutes of their self-prescribed doses, the two fans of the prog rock band found themselves collapsed onto the grass of the amphitheater, laughing loudly and screeching like animals from time to time as their fellow concertgoers stared at them in both confusion and horror.

Cutting crosses in the pavement with a blowtorch. Burning cigarettes' screaming faces into your front porch. You've got the brain of a poet but the body of a war horse. You don't believe in God, but you've got Odin's blood from the North. You're ready to heckle anyone who stands in your way, not even caring about the souls that you were meant to save.

I'm counting monsters living under my bed. They've made a home for themselves between the lint and the shoe boxes full of postcards and marbles collected over time and collecting as much dust as the stuff in Father Time's beard. They drink tea brewed from snags and splinters in the carpet, all while poring through my abandoned scrapbooks and laughing at the photos of me with the bad haircut I sported from first grade to freshman year of high school.

by Belinda Roddie If you stare at the ceiling for long enough, it looks like it's moving. Like a cracked, white ocean, undulating without moonlight. Pulsing without an actual pulse. I remember sailing across a white ocean once. My skiff took me to four countries, and everyone spoke the same language, but never a language that I understood. Their tribes collected stones and pocketed seashells to use as currency, and their councils ruled that I was inferior to them. I was not a god, they decreed, but a fragment of a civilization that had fallen due to buffoons and warmongers. I listened to their judgment and decided to accept it. Their punishment was to live with the guilt. Sometimes, that's worse than prison or execution. I've been lying on this same bed in the same room for seventeen days. I haven't slept. I haven't eaten. The last thing I drank was a bad margarita at a joint where my ex-girlfriend worked as a bartender. She told me that if she weren...

Here we are again, on my cardboard balcony, overlooking an ocean of paper and words. I'd offer you champagne, but I don't have much extra cash for good bubbly, so here's a hard cider served in a flute instead. A toast to the poets, the crazy people with too many sentences forming narratives in their heads. I hope you find comfort on a balcony that somehow withstands the rare California rain.

Second to last week at Fusion: Done. Crazy week of politics: Over. Current mood: You guys like puppies?! HAVE SOME PUPPIES!!! Puppiespuppiespuppiespuppiespuppies My work here is done. Have a great night and a great weekend, everyone!