I started feeding the stray cats when I moved in with him. To attract company, I began leaving food and water by the front door. Fuck Off was the first cat to frequent our patio...
As a punk band from Tampa
we were treated like kicked sand—
a nuisance and a bother
to be brushed aside
or shoved off the stage as fodder
for mosh pit marauders
and their skinhead soldiers
down front—that shit happened, no lie.
On the morning of the Inevitable Event, one hundred and eighty adolescents––the early comers, twitching like feral cats at the long mica tables of the cafeteria, heads bowed to handhelds––stiffened in synchrony, reflexively, like an orchestra tensing to the lift of a conductor's baton.
He only came back because Melvin said he would kill him if he didn’t pay off his debt by the end of the week. It was why he left St. Augustine, why he had no choice but to drive down to Lehigh Acres and dig up the box of money he’d buried in his brother’s yard fourteen years before.
Late evening in College Park, outside Downtown Orlando, sixty years after Jack Kerouac’s generation-defining opus On the Road reached critical acclaim, cicadas trilled in ancient trees teased by winds from Hurricane Irma...