Author: K. P. F. Holmes

A cat guards the storefront and stares down  the ice cream truck, while the middle-aged Honduran hums to Christian country.  No one would have guessed, but is it such a surprise when you assume other stereotypes of him? It’s glum at the laundromat, despite the hum of washers, the Vegas noise of the coin dispenser,…

It’s easy to fear the stiff-walking wolf; how many of us live in the woods? We’ve moved out so that nobody suffers a bit heel or gobbled grandmother. It’s hard to fear the ones without the maw or the black gum lips, the incisors and dog breath. When they smell like cloves. The man with…

You afterward thought against the ribbons.  They seemed to say, “I’ll wait by  the stairs. Call me down.”  The perfect bow and curled ends had you sitting on the top step, playing with your poodle skirt, swearing you didn’t care. There were better uses of your time— that you know and use against yourself next time…

His heels rasped the asphalt, and his  the curb. Another one bent before  the subway stairs to shit. That one I had seen bent over the rail to the new condo units, groaning.  Haven’t seen him since. There are many men, and some women, and they’ve become fixtures like the flowers that grow on bricks.…

I wonder, would they snatch you if you smiled? Ghosts are dogs that nose through the door and come wagging to the bedside, thumping things. Floating makes them cloddish, causes vertigo. They solicit the living to ground them, fill them, wisps to flesh again, to warm— and when they touch the limp hand on the…

One leg up. It’ll numb. The student defies Miss Applebaum because her name is Applebaum. It sounds funny and she leans  when she stands, like a drinking bird, except no hats inside. She docked Mooney for the snapback and now he slouches over the bubble sheet making a Seurat of the Math section. It’s only…

So many huskies in the city. What a treat! The turn of the tail, the blue laser eyes, intensity and ignorance of paradise. They belong on the tundra. They live with slanted cement and fenced saplings, puddles green with contaminants. So crisp. Proud of the leash, mushing on instinct, in the park with yellow hamburger…

The glasses looked like ice cubes and the whiskey tasted of flowers. There should have been an abundance of customers after the showers, on a clear, carless night, with the violet stripe sky and Cuban radio. They must have grown stubborn. They liked it inside, moling and melding into old velour,  ordering booze off a…