Stencil on a Street

Jordan Courtney

If I made my bones busking from Boston to San Bernardino until dusk when The tire dust doesn’t seem to settle would you Still look down upon me and make mental note of Every mark to make sure it is neither scar nor Needle poke remnant to retain my worthiness?

Of your park benches too painful for Peter from accounting but Palatial for poor Herman hurt too many times to count on Fingers falling off from frostbite last winter when the Willow on the mural of West Carver avenue was A waypoint for wandering wills wading the sea Uneasy and rising with red and blue staggered rhythms Rising to scare and send the pilgrimage stumbling but Somebody will still slip through with their Scroll on the tongue

Fossil fuel and concrete stench in the summer stuck to the Nose so long it lost its edge and like your god I know it is still there But I no longer process it like Professor Proctor pondering the world but Waiting for it to click is the call for cobwebs to come and Calcify like the body and eventually bend to the point of Snapping like the will and the fingers forced to stop the faceplant after Tripping but that’s just about all I do these days when the Dead eyes above the dais speak about the uncertain to the Apoplectic ones hurling towards the sun and the streetcorner

Katie Christensen

When I’m in pain, I feel compelled to write. I feel it like you feel nausea when you sit by a basin. I feel it like it’s imminent, and I’m desperate for it to leave.

I feel it as I lie here, motionless. As the words for each line, each stanza bounce off of each other and into the inside of my skull, leaving calluses from their repetition.

This compulsion, I feel it sitting inside my chest- clasped tight and squeezing.

I feel it spread down into my legs- they move, as if they have a mind of their own. I feel it as the words to the line I’d thought of several minutes (or hours) -at this point, who knows?- ago do somersaults behind my eyes and across the bridge of my nose, which bleeds and leaves clots made of equal portions my slippery, sporadic thoughts and red blood cells on my pillowcase, making stains that, though one day I will try, I’ll never be able to fully remove from existence.

When I’m in pain, I feel compelled to write. As if I had a pen in my hand, I could write my next book. An epic. One of the truth, of my real thoughts, about how it feels to be in pain and feel compelled to write. Of how it feels to sit and wait for the bags of liquid attached to you by a needle and hollow plastic thread to be empty, only to be replaced by another to try and make you better. But it only works for a moment, so you come home, and you’re in pain again, and you feel compelled to write.

When I’m in pain, as I am now, I feel compelled to write. But I don’t have a pen at the moment, nor a notebook or even a book to read that I could scrawl notes on in the margins. The lights are off, music is playing, the fan is on, and I am in bed, yet again. In pain, feeling compelled to write.