It’s like this. Everything bleeds. They locked the doors to the Augusta House in 1973. Home to transients, broken widowed men, old ladies and their cats. They swept out those nearly destitute remainders, padlocked the doors, and demolished it. The baroque columns replaced with the concrete brutalism of another faceless bank. Yet as…

It arises as a memory cloaked in vapor. Like all dreams do, surrounded by gasoline mist and the smell of tires in the August heat. The chainsaw scream of the two stroke mixes with the peals of childhood delight, as they lay righteous go-kart rubber. Soft-serve chocolate swirl dipped in Magic Shell for the victor. This hiraeth on…

It came as a fever in the blood, so long ago none remember the origin. Like chicken pox, a quick virus touch and then over. Another childhood rite of passage, like baby teeth, like eyes from blue to brown. After the fire of the fever they cool, the skin pales, the…

Of course it makes sense that the retards would be in love. Like seeks like. And I still hear the low murmurs as she boarded the yellow school bus with her brother, matching the groan of the engine as it geared into life dragging us up Scribner Hill Road to…

I bathe my dog in language. I lift his legs under spigots of nouns and rinse his paws in the flow of verbs. Adjectives mix with the soap on his skin and run down the drain. I speak to the cats in full sentences. I envelop them in the clouds of my dialogue. Run…

The sea is coming for us all, we little barnacles clutched to the coasts waiting for the coming tide when the caps melt, the Earth heats, and the oceans rise. And on these foggy mornings the sea sentinels rise from the dark green of the gulf to survey the land that will soon be theirs. Water snaking through cracks that will become streams, pooling in puddles that will become lakes. And the fog soldiers stand watch, laying flags of conquest in every depression, vapor clouds hang in valleys as they lay out the new maps. Estuaries without names, reaches not crossed, rivers that have yet to fall. Where water redraws the lines, when the sea comes for us all.

I live in a land of borders, and the boundaries of my fiefdom, my medieval Brunswick, the Methamphetamine Kingdom, this sovereign land, is the Radley-Swett Line. A Frostian unmended stone wall, and, every evening, I walk the wall with the sigil of this Kingdom, my sentinel dog, Radley. …

I never saw any children there, just the two of them already old when I was young, a sliver of wood smoke from a chimney in winter, and in the summer a collection of farming artifacts, car parts, windows, screen doors tires and rotting pallets. The hoarded ephemera of a life close to the edge…

In the place they called Augusta General in 1973, birth defects had to be profound to be noticed. Humpbacked Mongoloids, Thalidomide Flipper Men, but I slipped by, quietly ginger, with my soul born on the outside. Rusty and delicate as ginger skin, my soul is, fair to contrast my hair’s pale fire. Science has told me…