By CL Bledsoe If you’re looking for moonbeams, you’re blinking up the wrong horse. It’s not even night, here. That planet you see in the evenings hovering is actually Venus. Notice how far it remains from your fin-gers. A girl I once loved told me that. Let us consider the weight of evening air on the already swollen glands, the sweep of the breeze across reddening skin. Leaves dropping, still green, whose crunch underfoot will reveal only headaches and runny noses. Likewise baseball caps as serving any purpose other than covering receding hairlines, the wriggle of flesh in jeans drifting forever further from your straining thumbs. It was the taste you missed most at night.

By CL Bledsoe We killed the baby with our teeth. We killed it with questions about God. We killed the baby and sold its unused diapers to transients. We killed the baby so we could sleep. The baby wasn’t ours. We killed someone else’s baby. The baby’s real parents paid us to kill it. The baby wasn’t real. We were real, though. We had a cashier’s check to prove it. We kept it in her purse until we could make it to the bank. We buried the baby under our porch. We planted bushes around our porch. The bushes died. We killed the bushes by not fer-tilizing them properly. Babies don’t make good fertilizer. This was our lesson. This was what we learned.

By CL Bledsoe We couldn’t grow, so we ate seeds. We wore platform shoes, hopped in place and took pictures so the blur appeared to be legs. We avoid-ed preservatives, but it was obviously too late. We drank absurdity by the case when we could find it at Costco. Small dogs sniffed our legs but refused to hump us. Cats avoided our televisions. None of us did our homework, and yet we all graduated. Time became an en-emy to which we all conceded. Our thoughts were not our own, and that was fine as long as we didn’t have to dwell on it.

By CL Bledsoe When I couldn’t put up with the noise anymore, I went and found someone in green. “Can you move it a bit further away?” I asked him. He pointed me to another man in green and this one pointed me to a woman. She sent me back…

By CL Bledsoe Before he was discovered, before the press exploded things, before he was a name, he was just a smell on the interstate. He was drift-body, private, lump in the eddies, flesh swelling out. The discolora-tions around his neck, wrists and ankles were of no interest to any-one…

By CL Bledsoe The wind blew steadily for three days before they came. The power had been out since the first day from downed trees. The water was out because the pump was electric. We were pissing in the back yard, shitting in a child’s potty we’d found in the…

By CL Bledsoe a. I lost my virginity to an armadillo named Brenda. Have you ever been to Texas? Try finding something other than armadillos to sleep with. Then tell me something about love, funny pants. b. Strange men came to the door, begging for gluten-free bread. We never turned anyone…

By CL Bledsoe They have no shoes. Their toes curl like clenched fists. They live on a diet of chocolate and blood and never share. We hand them paper as offering, and they take our fingers. We try to teach them to dance, and they drip on our carpets and stare. We try baking, leasing miner-al rights quite reasonably. They have no interest in the things of the belly or hands, only what’s beneath each. They smile while they peel our faces, chuckle while they guzzle from our throats, guffaw loudly while pureeing our organs. They sniffle in the heat of our common rooms, leave muddy trails on our stylish white carpets. When there’s nothing left of us, we rise and follow them out into the drizzle, chocolate in our pockets, coldness beneath our skins.

By CL Bledsoe 1. A lack of whiskers and yet a general scratchiness. 2. In the place of eyes, teeth. 3. Cream for cheeks. Also, texture. 4. Styling of hair. Cleanliness. 5. A certain Romanness of the nose having never been broken by supposed loved ones. 6. Multiple eyebrows. 7. Zipper lines. 8. The invitation of love. 9. Divisibility by seven. 10. Feathers. Softness. Purity. 11. A belief in hard work and Christian Values. 12. The tiniest of holes around the abnormally puffy lips. 13. The inability to smile or experience joy. 14. Lack of blood beneath the surface. 15. A sense of worth betrayed by price tags stylishly sewn into the back of each head.