This poem is published in Grist.

Bedtime Stories

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No. 3 (Addiction).

The man wore a wide-brim hat and lied as often as he smoked.

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No. 9 (Fidelity).

The waitress made an ashtray for the traveling salesman out of a foil chewing gum wrapper. She then returned to the kitchen and proposed to the short-order cook. They eloped beside the dumpster in the alley behind the restaurant and began their new life on-the-clock. A grease fire broke out. When the television cameras finally found them, they had been married a long while. Their recollections, though lucid, gave no hint of remorse. A burned building was surely worth a well-built marriage, they reckoned.

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No. 10 (Local Tonics).

Apoplexy was a kitchen appliance. Linoleum is a liqueur in Malta.

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No. 14 (Cinema/Airplane).

Light bulbs lead the way to perdition.

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No. 20 (Western Expansion).

Fourteen fumaroles intoned ash to the west. We would find the petroliferous sun more accommodating than this, though in later days it would judge us just as ruefully.

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No. 23 (Panopticon).

Shoplifters were imprisoned in a shopping mall where they were doomed to carry out their vice at the expense of themselves.

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No. 27 (Discovery).

Some kind of starfish!

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No. 30 (National Holiday).

Plastic bags fluttered in the tree like birds. Brick turned flaxen in the sun. Litter was the new weather. Decay, the kindest werewolf.

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No. 35 (Consequence).

The insomniac’s doctor gave her a jar of Tsetse flies. Even the plants slept. The heat pipes snored. The carpets collapsed. The house seeped sleep. By the time her postman came to, he had missed nine routes. He was sure to be sent to the dead letter office. It was where letters went to die.

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No. 36 (Regret).

A hand extends from the desert floor. In it a photograph of a young woman; her hair alive with the wind. You realize: she must have really been something.