eidetic photo of ham sandwich perched atop fire hydrant outside the Woodmere library. somewhere i hear my great grandpa smile & die in the same Joe Cocker song. but it was a Beatles song.
my best friend who used to be my best friend with benefits had an intrusive thought where they could save me from manic episodes & overdoses & withdrawals & everything with the magic of a simple fuck. simple. as if. but we can dream. & we do.
dad makes pancakes on sundays but i wait until he’s on the last of the batter to eat the ones dark at the edges from the pan getting too hot. it’s like eating fire. it’s eating fire.
in Until Dawn Ashley asks the ouija board if she’s speaking with the dead sister or the dead sister. the dead is a sister regardless of what the question is.
Hot Topic is renown for having only one rhyme scheme of plaid.
during elementary school recess four square games involve two teams trying to be the same team until the teams are kaleidoscopic. the warning signs of epilepsy according to Mayo Clinic are known as aura, singular & plural. they also note that epilepsy affects people of all genders.
until Andrea tells me oceans are not categorically soup. until Brian calls me a traitor to my dick. until the mom i wish would adopt me tells me i have to rinse the dishes of their bubbles to be truly clean. until i was 24. i was never told.
my uncle Jim reminded me that checkers has no house rules. you can’t go back & forth. you can’t be indecisive. once you let go, there’s no letting go.
Kurt Cobain says fish don’t have feelings, which probably isn’t true. he doesn’t mention anything about plants, homophobes, Christian iconography. it’s possible that people in general are the only animals without feeling. the drums, against Dave Grohl’s wishes, are understated, meant to block Cobain from happiness. it worked.
fall weather like a metaphor.
sweaters from Goodwill, about five, six dollars.
later expelled from school, David made a joke in band class about time signatures being able to write. we all counted down.
only landscape artists. it’s only them who can catalog a place while being there. otherwise, it might not exist.
last year i was supposed to write letters addressed to dead celebrities for my friend James, for a photography capstone. in a notepad, the list read:
Bowie, a few ex-bfs, Dorian Gray, the raccoon i ran over in Meauwataka last December, Amy Winehouse’s hair, my grandparents, my old roommate’s laser removed star tattoo.
dad says a watched star never falls. it’s a psalm he made up in the moment. a plane flew overhead, & then he fell asleep. he missed it.
works cited page of several Kerrang! & Billboard articles highlighting 90s songs about gender identity, being trans. mostly grunge, alt rock. most of them weren’t listed.
best worn around a bonfire. folk punk show, Skelletones in Grand Rapids, Michigan. underneath the frostline. ritual to pass the time. repeating the word ritual until it molds with meaning. red & black sleeves, etiquette for the littler faiths. ritual to pass as a fixture of the binary.
to pass at all.
games of i spy in the rental car with my little sister where no one is the winner. we end up learning patterns of what the other often sees. elephants, salmon, burning pillows, swords. she asks me if i can find a cloud in the shape of a cloud. & this meant thunder was about to gasp for air on a dock like a hooked fish. or it meant there wasn’t any room left for interpretation.
clothed. political direction as a bouncy ball defying classical physics. each descent creates less & less force. professionalism but cool, tessellated like what i imagine songs look like. as particles. cubic, helix, nonlinear cnidaria. gelatinous, plasmid, beyond human refractory.
they could be anything they want to be. & yet.
Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone's Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Impossible Archetype and Emerald City, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan.