Emma Goldman. Numb fingers rip at the waxy and crumpling skins of onions. Oildrops. Progress. Wrappers upon the eyes. The harsh fruit within. The frail, innocent, wicked wind. A boxed-up blanket covered in warnings. A sticker factory. FRAGILE. THIS SIDE UP. DECEASED. TO BE BURNED. CONTAMINATED. GINORMOUS. TO BE EXONNERATED.

Where a man once was with his white-cupped tide of coffee tilted as if to suggest an unreliable axis, where he once sat on the cold, dry sidewalk next to an open-mouthed orange road barrel, full of trash and snow and rolling carelessness, now with the rain on and on point I pass him again, transformed into a wide black garbage bag with the strain of something square stretching it out. A broken piece of furniture. A bag of bones. EXACT SAME PLACE. A couch with the bottom blown out. Aren’t we pretty? The room of a stupid teenager. Black. A phone as a centerpiece. Some inner organ gone corrupt and unnoticed. Like your lungs, darling. I cry and flirt.

An old man with fake orange hair eats a small hot dog covered in a pile of anemic onions. An actress with a flat backside and faked blonde hair lets her cell phone ring some recognizable bastardization of a popular song several moments too long before answering it chirpily and eerily-on the very next note in the progression. She knows her life so well. The Onions and the Actress could make a delightful fairy tale together.

A face of the rave. A raving face. The face of the grave. An unoriginal rant. A machine gun full of poppyseeds and leaking vinegar on expensive, forbidden carpet. The president removes his shoes in the white house. The president has head lice. The president wears plastic booties and has only one time in his life aimed a revolver into his own or someone else’s mouth. This is a story that will never be spoken of again.