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What will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water?

Wicked fictions wrap a young tongue’s sweet-tipped fibs into fact.

A homecoming, she says, as if you hadn’t been back in decades.

Our brains interpolate from surrounding images, fooling us.

One day, we will all turn into choir girls—all soft and hollow inside.

The coverage of the state funeral, black horse bearing an empty saddle.

God was surrounding the chair, leaves flourishing from a sickly tree.

A simple line of raging wet nearby, how as a kid I pictured the Nile.

In the many pages of the book of love this is only one story.

If life is an open vein, what’s brave about a sleeve-heart, sweetheart?

Corn repeats itself into a haze of tassels and sheaving leaves.

My “lonelymaking.” Also known as my horrible secret, continent-wide.

We did not know at the moment of parting that it was a parting.

She only eats condiments, pickles, slices of sharp cheddar.

You were drowning in the bathtub. Mother was in her room.

In that world I was a fish too eager to enter the nets; here, I’m a river.

insomniacs gesturing in a cave of neon light the narrative of their lives

Not all his children love themselves. Look at little Adrienne.

After you have read all you possibly can there may be a few lines left.

Just because we have birds inside us, we don’t have to be cages.

I wore the rose pants for weeks without telling anyone.

He had looked on it a thousand times and it never failed to kill him.

My first true love was Underwood, my mother’s typewriter.

When the light failed she listed all the places he might find her.

Craig Bueltel

The portal light, on your face, now, a rose light on a sinking freighter.

A boy knew he wouldn’t see his mother’s face as he rose from the mat.

All I could focus on was if he was going to ask me to date him.

An idea surfacing—a crack of orange teeth. As if a ceiling disappears.

The sense all along has been that there’s some madness in her.