felishous

R. Resting behind the counter. Intricate gadgets scattered on the counter. Like clockwork. He pushes it all aside. "Oh, this is just a project," he informs me. I should've stopped. Asked: "What sort of projects" or "What exactly are you working on?"

She sits. Knee on knee. Lower leg swinging like some drunk branch on an elm. Her arms are crossed, resting on her belly fat (which she can feel through her gray fleece pea-coat). His 5 o' clock shadow grins, bearing milky teeth. "Hallo. I'm from Bwoston," it hails. His hair has grown. His eyes have become more selfish, more careless. What a hypocrite. "Rich people piss me off," he said. The damn prick. And look at that lazy ass. His aunt'$ money got him out of state, in some east coast college, potential budding like cat nip. "God damn you," she said. Pursing her lips. He stands, walks away, head low as he searches his Blackberry. He

They say you can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl. We're born with it in our veins. Whatever it is. It's there until we're silent, stuffed six feet beneath chigger-infested grass and aching elms. And still, it pulses through our dead instincts. White trash girls sneer, bearing murky teeth. White trash girls shriek, rusty words clanging against torn lips. A crucifix rests against her freckled skin, dangling in angst, pitifully swinging. Eyes shadowed in fishnet glitter, her sun-spotted and dirtied irises. Rouge lips decaying, she retells her clammy night with the contractor

"Have you ever swallowed your sorrow?" It burns because gorging on something as rank as self-pity only sits in your stomach for a month, like that rotten roast beef you ate after you took one last hit of H and you realized how disgusting food really was and how your pockets were barren like her uterus, her desolate womb. "We're never safe here, not anymore." Because he just had to piss off the Vietnamese gang of starving, frustrated savages; they worked like the Vietcong, almost reborn. And they stalked him every night shift, licked the tip of his shadow. And they were silent, dead, he had no idea he even set them on fire. As the tea ket

I want to choke on chains so rusted that my blood feels victimized by iron oxide. I want to dig so deeply that the unrelenting soil shreds my fingernails. I want to toast socialism for robbing people of what freedom tastes like; they know a numbing escape.

She said he carved valleys into her face: valleys from scars so deep you could drown in them, scars so persistent that even sleep couldn't ward them away, scars that gorged on freedom. Pearls galloped out of her wet orifice: the enslaved warriors of sullen days past.