Counterfeit

Road Trip

Susan Richardson

Tire tracks scar history onto the asphalt, pulling travelers into the story of a lost highway. The heat hits the ground like a truck barreling into the skin of the pavement. It is a road that time spat out, where secrets take cover in trees that stand like sentinels, waiting for the rain to lull roots from the dust. Dreams bloom under a veil of branches, plucking shamrocks as they fall from the sky. Music winds its melody into the clouds, colors clamoring to saturate the air, until the hum of an engine creeps over the hill, leaving the metallic scent of death on the landscape.

The Sun Creeps Up and Swallows Joy

Susan Richardson

Sidewalk dwellers escape the pavement, searching for blades of coolness in the grass. They sink into mirages that ripple and shimmer with the promise of relief, but reverie is severed by the venom of the season. There is only the dense heat of its gaze, parched tongues and energy siphoned through the tops of blistering scalps. Children choke on the fumes of heatwaves. No clouds appear in a punishing sky to quench the skin of homeless families. They succumb like prisoners without eyes, breath dictated by thirst, voices pulled into the melting throat of an urban backdrop. The sun creeps up and swallows joy, hiding the incandescence of rain beneath its tongue. Hope dissolves into the teeth of summer.

Counterfeit

Susan Richardson

You take my hand and lead me into the dark, aware of my blindness and the soft texture of my heart. Your whispers of love are counterfeit, expertly crafted words that fall from your teeth with flickers of duplicity. Hungry for the incendiary quality of your mouth, I lean in to catch the embers on my tongue, swallowing the warm elixir of your lies. Your thirst for other women is something you teach me to ignore, fingers sliding like flames across my throat.

Treehouse

Cameron Gorman

were you there in the spring, in the woods underneath the rusted tub while i swung an old ax at a dead tree’s chest?

sure, you were already gone by then, but i could sense someone’s eyes on my back.

already in my third cycle of change, of not knowing who i was, of youthful lung destruction,

i had gotten good at knowing when someone’s eyes lingered—

(and i know you were already gone by then)

but tell me, when i was alone in the woods, arcing myself and my heart through that dulled metal,

trying to wring something through a handle and blade, trying to convince myself i was angry, angry,

under the rocks of the dry brook, inside the sand of the log-rot, behind the green-choked trees, were you watching?