My Cardboard Balcony

I Heard by Belinda Roddie I heard all of the shouting and the noise that came from the Grand Hotel on the west side of the river, and saw a swarm of boys gathering 'round the window where the guests made wild rejection of the city's norms. Society never was more ignored for alcohol and gossip in the dorms and tiny rooms where they preferred to board, and cigarettes were pilfered from a stand, while harder drugs were smuggled from the ships that bobbed in the nearby water. Each man overdosed just enough for all their lips to turn blue as the sky when dawn encroached, and then quiet at last would then approach.

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

Little Workers by Belinda Roddie The honeycomb of headlights triggers me back to a previous suitor of mine who was filled to her boots with bees Golden hair to match little golden bodies clustered in bedazzling lumps all up and down her front, never stinging her, not once She was a pretty picture at the apiary, surrounded by waxy hives, and she tasted sweet, too, like the natural product of her adopted sons and daughters I hear the buzzing now, from both the insects and my lover's lips, but then the humming turns into a roar, and I'm back on the road receiving an angry automobile's kiss

Standing up to your knees in wet cement, you know you can flee the scene, but you're also aware of the prints you'll leave behind, prints that will dry into bits and pieces of fossilized humanity for the forensic scientists to study. Trouser hems clotted in gray as you settle on a bus that takes you to the edge of Nowhere, only Nowhere's an actual place now, with people living in it, and they all have your number.

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.