(mac)ro(mic)

The war drilled the sound of sirens into my mind. When I began to have nightmares, the mechanical screams dominated them. The sky is always dark, clouds rolling through as if they too are afraid of living in the city. The street lights give off […]

Allen Ginsberg had died the day before, so the open mic poetry night began with a local kid reading Howl, only he got carried away and was told to stop, and right by the tiny stage an old guy called Gene would snipe or gush […]

I climb into my car, head south down the mighty 405, drive to Torrance again, to my old neighborhood, start to relive my childhood shit. I see in my mind the little mudman I unearthed from a corner of the backyard in my lonely afternoon […]

I’m sorry to tell you your uncle Jaime died last week of a heart attack. I read the text message from my mother, type:  Ok thank you for letting me know, and then shove the phone into the bookshelf where I won’t hear it buzz.  […]

See him as xe first sees him that summer: skin faultless and slick and pulsing in the hot lights underground. His curls big and weightless. He smiles down at xer and his hips swerve to xer side; he says he’s heard a local band is […]

My coffee cup lies in shards on the kitchen floor. Boutros Boutros Ghali licks his paws. Can you at least feign remorse, I ask the cat. He blinks, yawns and lifts a back leg as he begins licking his hindquarters. You are disgusting Boutros, I […]

will not really go down in history because it’s not even an age or an era. But it’s an individual one, something bound to be repeated throughout the year. It could be— any day really.  When all efforts of third-world resilience are overwhelmed by a […]

While I am a strong advocate of home cooking over dining out, an exception was made when my father suggested Bubbalou’s Bodacious Bar-B-Que for my eighteenth birthday. We must’ve arrived during peak hours considering there were practically zero parking spaces available. After several rounds of […]

7 a.m. One of them stirs underneath the duvet. No matter how cold it is outside the covers, they hop out and onto the hardwood floors to make coffee for the pair. While the water boils for the Chemex glassware, they survey the kitchen: It […]

Collin had eaten candles nearly all of his life. He could remember his mother and father encouraging him to lick chocolate frosting off a candle from his sixth birthday cake, bite into it, and peel the wax from the wick like flesh from a bone. […]

First you have to remember things the way they happened. This is not always easy. Ravens flew past me that day and that’s what I remember first about Josephine. She appeared and so I thought, for a moment, that she came with the ravens. That […]

It sits at an angle, no longer plumb with the sky, at odds with our world. The fence seems sturdy, I went out and prodded it to make sure it’s safe. The squirrels scamper over it with aplomb, accustomed already to its slant. My wife […]