Murphy Street

A lonely whore, leaning against the tired brick of an alleyway on a cigarette break, looks down just in time to see a rusty needled syringe held in the mouth of a scrawny alley cat cut through her nyloned shin.

Who knows what she thinks, reversing her nicotine lover into the air with a curse at the blood dripping on her work shift.

With a turn she flicks the rest of her cigarette at the black nightmare scampering back down the alleyway with a bullet in its haunting mouth and heads back to what she knows.

Years later, crumpled up in the sheets of a state sponsored antiseptic association, she’ll hear the whispers of the nurses just as clear as their menacingly silent footsteps down the polythane hallways.

Just another dirty whore. This disease is what she gets.

It swirls around what’s left of her, melting into the plastic tube that is taped against its will to her arm. And she sighs, knowing they would never believe

That a moment away from the street and a hungry feline were all it took instead.

Running Out of Socks

My father was only ever faithful to red

He, the son of a tobacco prophet and a beautiful German who occasionally found children growing inside of her despite spending her marriage years sleeping in a separate twin bed, was born with blue eyes that forsook him for their own journeys

When he refused to live as a proper \ son growing up in a house of green, his mother would tie him to an oak tree in the back yard with a crimson nylon umbilical cord that birthed him backwards from the earth.

Marlboro reds, the love child of the prophet, found him behind sheds and claimed him as their follower as the days passed

Two wives and a daughter later he brought a woman with a headdress of fire home one night. She stayed for years, gaining debts and losing body until she succeeded in meeting her own crimson.


And then, like a spider gorging its web back into its abdomen, he packed himself with alcohol soaked silk and moved on to wives of lesser hues.

When the beautiful German expired on that twin bed, she could not tick back into the earth because her son had been adding poison to his coca cola just a little too much.

And the bottles sighed at him with a whisper of “I am not your god.”

So he looked for the red stains in the hands of a holy man and immersed himself in a baptismal plea

But though he had always been faithful to the pigment of prediction, the pink cousin envy of scars stayed silent.

And now he sits, the good book gathering dust alone in a brick house of dogs and shadows, picking through crayola boxes to remove the one who made him forsake himself.