My Cardboard Balcony

Four Hundred Times by Belinda Roddie Four hundred times I've made mistakes, and yet you seem to think the very best of me. You kiss my tears away and press your chest against my own, dispelling tragedy that I have concocted in my poor head. How many are out to get me? Zero, you remind me, and no, I won't be dead before thirty. You do not make a show of your affection, but you make it clear how much I mean to you, and I feel so ashamed for dragging you through sheer guilt trip after guilt trip. Still, though, you try to break the spell I've cast upon myself, my demons, you repeat, are someone else.

"Can I help you with anything?" "No," replied the old man wearing a top hat. "I'm just looking." He proceeded to shuffle his way into the culinary section, and for the next twenty minutes, he proceeded to stand there, admiring every toaster he came across. He seemed especially fond of the chrome toasters - glistening royal blue and bright red - but certainly didn't touch them.

Pink Peonies by Belinda Roddie in the boutique she gathers six of them wraps them in bandages mummifies their cheeks and their lips the song they used to sing is muffled in static now framed in glass now dried and stowed away now frozen in permanent spring

Angels by Belinda Roddie Funny, how all the women I've loved have contained an 'a' within their name: Mostly at the beginning, shouldering the burden, but others elsewhere, and while it may seem simply facetious to see coincidence in the mouth of language - or commonality, truly, given vowels' investment in our kisses - I can tell, while counting its teeth, how much the faces still shine in the enamel of my memory: My first crush, paralyzed like an insect in a tree's tears; my college infatuation, sharing a namesake with sweet, falsehood-hating, suicidal Karenina; my own wife, the forest residing in a French utopia - and lately, the abbreviation of an angel, brown curls and a crafty smile, trading words like hot coals during a rainy Manhattan late afternoon. Funny, that; funny, life, and funny, names and nomers on the fingerprints of strangers and lost loves - or the "illusion" of love, or the "delusion" of it(?) -...

Honeymoon In Honolulu by Belinda Roddie He wore a shark tooth necklace, but she was eyeing his sister at the bar on the beach, watching her stir sunset Mai Tais for a good sunrise. He sported a strong tan, but she liked the scorched red of his sister's hair, and when she served her a drink, all the waves ceased for just a second. It was like percussion stopped, but the music continued (the melody didn't need rhythm on the sand), and once he finally left, she took his sister across the shoreline, where they split a local beer, told stories, then kissed twice before it got dark because they both were scared of their shadows.