Cover of Like Stendhal Syndrome, But Less (Finalist, Who Freaking Cares Writing Contest for Poetic Rejects)

Like Stendhal Syndrome, But Less (Finalist, Who Freaking Cares Writing Contest for Poetic Rejects)

A faint mural lies on the

sandstone, sun-warmed, against

which men press their foreheads.

They, or, to be honest, we, search

for alcoves into which a little note

might have been coiled up and

slid, might be waiting for us still,

saying,

in last century’s italic hand, you

were always the one I wanted or

maybe just you were not entirely

unnoticed. We use longing like

radar, to find the way.


The smell of minerals in hose water

steals over the fence like comfort, a

faint echo of childhood when, before the

mailed mortgage scams and clink of ice

cubes bleeding into scotch, one would

jump through the sprinkler’s fantail and

land in the cool wet grass. The lawn is

coming back to life, having died in

strange patches that suggested, if you

didn’t look closely, glyphs from an old

sacred text with their own

incomprehensible pull