from Small Fires of the Near Future
1.
///
Trust your confusion, it might be kashrut
the storyteller is still asleep, the word conditions is not relevant to the ongoing, the helical, premature repentance
soliloquy no longer being an option
will be or shall have been
whose voice is this, and under what conditions
[ ]
at least today’s storm is thorough
some new or gently used
an aluminum railing in the throat
2.
///
Sleep is not God and not just the future anymore but Eurydice was a magnet, Orpheus was part should and part never, or if lyre than, wait wrong synagogue
wrong neckerchief
don’t tell me everything I might want to know, Moshe
you know what the color blue means, you know why lemons are sour
[ ]
Technicolor
slowly removed, like a prologue or a fingernail
3.
///
There must be––please don’t this is no arrow––angelic silence––she holds you by the face and of course you kneel, dear reader, Moshe, mister––
who are you
there must be a reason for all this unspecified choking
[ ]
not just the world is illuminated
only the redacted is on fire
Nicholas Grider is a writer, artist, and musician whose books, the story collection Misadventure (A Strange Object) and odd things Thirty Pie Charts (Gauss PDF) and Get Excited (Imipolex). His work has appeared in Caketrain, Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Guernica and other publications. He currently lives in Milwaukee, where he’s nebulously in school again trying to decide whether to apply to grad school in neuroscience or classical composition.
