The Hypnotist
A wild cheetah is running through our neighborhoods. We can’t set the cheetah on fire. Who said we wanted to? It’s like we keep waking up with new, unexplained wants every morning. I’ve been fighting this hypnotism for years. The best way is to not know the language. Resist. The doctor shouts all of the prescriptions at the weeping mothers. You can remember it from childhood. Like a dark summer day, a doll with a bloody scratch on her face, a still crystal lake. A superstitious landscape looks away from being photographed. Everything is real. They say just a body doesn’t prove anything.
Dolphins
It is cool to be unmotivated and dead. Do what I do. Be on the beach in sunglasses while it pours and pours. It’s amazing how much of the ocean is made up of just being looked at. How does something survive in that existence? Where do the dolphins go? It is time to convey how much the prison industrial complex is ruining how we give and receive love. It is like “the death of the author” floating headless around your bed while you sleep. Imagine this kind of “synergy”: on one beach is the act of erasure going out with the tide while on another, miles and miles away, washing ashore in a wave of blood is its effect.
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Shane Kowalski lives in Pennsylvania. He has an MFA in fiction from Cornell University. His first book of short fiction, Small Moods, is forthcoming from Future Tense Books. He works for the United States Postal Service.
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 