There is no word for “freedom” in biology; in family idiom, no concept of the Self. Cruel monsters of my childhood still surface, lurking too close in the genetic pool. How can I stand apart? When will I be my own? In hostile mirrors I reflect my sister’s face and carry out the day’s routine …
No longer are my dreams long halls for monsters: people there these nights are faceless and benign, ready to waltz with me when threads of music knit the raveled sleeve of care. My nightmare enemies have moldered to the dust beneath my bed. In shadowed closets, they hung up their grotesqueries and departed, closing …
What if they are the true perceptions of your life, those thoughts which come at two in the morning, when shadows twist and shift like lunatics and darkness presses its cold fingertips hard against your straining eyes? What if the dull rage in the dregs of booze glazing the last ice cubes, at the …
They thought that we would go like sheep bemused and walking in our sleep, unmindful cattle herded deep down into the nightmare: the troll behind the closet door, the serpent in the dresser drawer— we walked the charcoal corridor, inhaled the fetid air. And still we spin our knotted thread along the bench, beneath …
Night in the house of my childhood invaded more than corners: it crept into the soul, a golem breeding nightmares. Awakened by my screams, mother came to my bedside offering comfort. She sat there, a dark shadow, her glinting eyes in deeper pools of darkness. And I agreed that I was comforted, oh quickly …
A soldier on leave from the Garguantuan War, Maggie’s husband whistled the path home at the thought of her vegetable stew. Maggie would have beamed for his arrival had she not been forced to squeeze between enormous ankles, duck under a nose holding coats, to greet him. He dragged her out to display his bounty: …
for Melissa Ensephalopus is not an arctic creature, she says. It is in the line of sirens and sinuses, octopi and angels. No leviathan, or sexually aberrant penguin, but no study has been conducted. It walks upright on tentacles, though, has walrus teeth in a snake’s head. It doesn’t suffer from deep-sea gigantism like Architeuthis …
8:01 a.m.: A train whistles, and Godzilla cannot find it. A flock of vultures flies in circles. Godzilla, bored with smashing expensive buildings, spins, staring at the birds. 10:10 a.m.: Dizzy from spinning, Godzilla drops into a doughnut shop, and his tail dips in the deep-fryer. He roars and runs in more circles. 10:59 a.m.: …
I wanted Freddy to cut up the jerk, but he always went for the girl first. He’d splash his sweater with blood, his teeth behind a smirk caked in amber and the residue of teenage souls. The subtext of claws in flesh, thrust performed in private with give and take. I spent most of high …
The little one, Pearl, rose early with a head full of ideas. She was the last of her blood; no other blood survived. Granted the sunrise, she wormed to the ladder and clambered to the surface grating. The monsters who ruined the world needled and crushed, chittering above. Teeth, they termed them though they had …