Not long after the death of my grandfather (爷爷/爺爺), my family resumed its familiar tradition. When both my grandparents were alive, my parents, my sister and me would be regularly treated to dinner at their home, where we’d enjoy the familial and communal experience of eating together and watching television. The stark difference now was […]
loss
Shrine, to joke, bar
It is the year 3001, and humanity has almost reached the point of no return: only a select few humans—known as “The Feelers”—are able to experience emotions, and a governmental program has decreed that they be medicated to ensure they to adopt the detached, unfeeling dispositions of the younger generations… After the Feeler’s ashes were […]
When Silence Fails
It is almost exactly ten yearssince we shared drunken kissesin an unheated barin Chattanooga, Tennessee.Later that night, drunker still,a kiss broke into laughterwhen we rolled off my bedand fell to the floor. Ten years later: youstill in Tennessee, in Nashville, mein Phoenix, Arizona. A catch-upconversation: You told me aboutyour kidney transplants, addictionto pain medication, recovery,getting […]
Dad
He ate plain oatmeal every morningin the same leather chair that mom got him for Father’s Dayin 88. One breakfast after finishing an orange grapefruit, I told him that I loved him just loud enough so he would not hear George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, The Angle at St. John […]
Butterflies and Other People
For two years, I lived on the edge of woods, on the outskirts of Chattanooga, Tennessee, between a sewage plant, an American Indian burial ground, and the state mental hospital. Outside my house I saw a butterfly, the most radiant being I had ever seen — blue and black and ivory, incandescent. A friend later […]
Not Even His Mother
No one could breathe for him.Hauled onto the curb as if he were dead already. Heavy as a bag of sand at a construction site. Still human, sucking the steel-tipped teeth of men. Gathered around his neck.They say that you had enemies.Perhaps he was one of them.They say you had a background. Maybe that is why your mother’s blood […]
My Turn
When it was my turn to go in,I sat cross-legged by the ventilator and told my buddy goodbye.I could have cried but he deserved more.He deserved what carries no weight.Time. Before the lungs fill with river water and the dream oozes away from the ribs of lotus petals caught between the rocks.