Rain hissed against the stained-glass, turning saints into smears of color—a fractured Virgin Mary, a weeping Peter. The air smelled of damp stone and something sharper, like the metallic tang of a thumb pressed too long against a blade,...

I felt as if I had displaced the last bobbin of my soul, like dominos falling on a stacked deck of cards, each piece tumbling into a void like a key without a hole. The threads of my mind...

In the sticky heat of a midnight confession booth where the whiskey's hour clings to my roots and the preacher don’t ask no questions, just slides me a cigarette through the grate,and ask me. "No regrets?" There's a bullet hole...

The stool sighs under my deadweight cheer, A drunken moon stuck to the veneer. The neon hums like a pissed-off fly... Ah, well. Pass us a tin, will ya, Bill?Bill slides a tin—condensation sweats— the kind that forgives a...

The steam uncoils like a whispered lie, a ghost in the curl of a tea-leaf,—black as a raven’s sigh, but something lingers, steeped too hot.Not leaves, but darkness, swirling slow, a stain that clings to porcelain bone, it pours...