How We Crack Each Other in the Late Dark
Andrew Spiess I'm out of luck and sitting at a low-lit old wood bar with a friend trading absurdities and growing oily and blowing air out of our noses until we're purple-faced and hard-pressed to breathe and unable to see over the stretched skin of our faces. Our laughs don't pop like feeble bubbles. They're more like brass horns blaring between our lips, more like misbehaving alarms, the kind of derangement that punches a rhythmic pulse, the kind of strobing outcry that chokes. They fizzle in our heads smear our teeth stain our tongues and we wipe them from our mouths with our wrists and boil like a soup made from chunks of heart and continue in a flare that inflates our bellies and splits the air with heat so now I can't sit still because I'm losing focus and these crows are clawing up our throats and I can't stop retching and I'm finally empty |
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Andrew Spiess: Andrew Spiess's work has appeared in Permafrost, Prairie Margins, The Miscreant, and is forthcoming in The Hamilton Stone Review. He received a Louise C. Cooper Book Award from Bowling Green State University, where he studied, and a poem of his has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He works and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
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