Today was the last Monday of the school year. I feel like my brain is about to burst. There’s so much review work, research to find, lockers to clean out, blah blah blah. My head is full of thoughts about different classes, friends, and teachers, plus the book I’m reading, the story I’m writing, and my— non-existent— love life. Time to practice driving; no, time to answer this text message; no, time to eat. I have all the time in the world to do all this. Why does it feel like so much?

Hey, Monday. Have you met my PMS?

thusly: immortalize or starve; carve footprints in your inner passions or pretend to be foreign adrift and burning bright as a floating candle. strangers and allies alike, they could form mumbles and crisp gasps with mouths pagan and polite as raining night air. a sojourner can find here subsistence in kind or a sub-rosa revolution against the crown; be articulate and fruitful, responsible to the many-consuming bulldogs of hierarchy; can waste and defraud time intoxicated by slanted eyes and small asses, good manners, subservient attitudes; this developing peninsula is both danger and opportunity for young men of substance or immorality.

The wind makes people crazy. Clouds move through the night sky thin and fast. Curtains burst into rooms, flustered, erect and across the neighborhood the angry slam of doors rises to a crescendo. There will be no sleep in little houses tonight. Slender walls and cheap floors moan. Japanese maples and landscape shrubs cow down, submissive. The smell of wet cement is on the cool hot air although there is no sign of rain. Reading lights and the moon glow of TVs flicker on and off, on and off anxiously. The huff and turn of sleepless bodies becomes a heartbeat.