It’s incorrect and has been since we’ve stopped using typewriters! And it annoys copyeditors. And it fucks up paragraph alignment.

According to current typesetting convention, two spaces never appear side by side, regardless of what your typing teacher taught you. In fact, one editing job is to ensure that double spaces are turned into single spaces.

—Lecture slide from a Ryerson publishing course 

The brittle clockwork
of my ovaries
grinds slowly to a halt
and I’m left
persecuted in the aftermath
of a slow season, waiting.

A whore I am and a whore
I shall be
but bless,
oh bless me,
in your crucified shadow.

Forget me not.
I’ve leapt through time,
and I swear
I’ve come back for you.

The fool on the hill
died smiling, smiling,
and who would I be—
but come with me instead.

It isn’t so bleak as that
and we’ll dance on
in flowers
and suspended chords. 

There are already so few of us left. It’s scarcely been two months and already we’re down to nine. Nine students—outnumbered by the instructors now. But I mustn’t let myself be distracted. My purpose with this log is to better analyze events to stay as competitive as possible. I have to focus on the details before I forget them so I can anticipate new threats quickly enough and learn from my errors. I don’t have time to dwell on the others. I’m risking enough as it is by working with Augite.

It was a trying day for her. She’s quick and she’s powerful but sometimes she hesitates. I’m worried that will fail her in the end. She had been ranking highly all semester but lately her scores have been lagging. She needs to wake up. She’s increasingly dazed by the intensity of the training as more students fall. Of course we’ve always known that the majority of postulants won’t advance as neophytes, but it’s hard to really anticipate the violence and suddenness of the deaths before enrolment at the academy. 

One morning there are ten postulants at the lecture. The next morning there are nine…

Read More

Once again lingering
among the weeds
and the silence
broken only
by a sigh.

Help.

The word,
however, is
bone-dry and
too gangrenous
to slip free and fly.
 

That forest is verdant, now,
and sprinkled with flowers
as well as thorns.

The nails stay crucifixed
within that ancient black oak,
but they’re made gentle by rust.

And I am no skeleton
crumpled on its mossy floor—
I am no soil-dampened heap.

No, I am crowned in laurels now
and sit, regnant, on a fallen log:
smiling.

Alone, I reign slowly
behind the veils of vine and bough,
hidden in honeyed sovereignty.

♔ My ghostly past.
♕ My crystalline present.
♛ My shaped but empty future. 

syphon me out of this vacuum 
where I already see the conclusion
where I know I’ll be my own extraction
spitting blood in your open eyes