Soyos Shorts

  SEPTEMBER 26, 2022 Share Falling into the black streets, after rose teased hippy dropping slang romance of four thousand years – Jesus the skin o f your mother once stretched over you and my weeping organisms of peanut butter and jam butties under an orange sky waltzing around the blue, that I bathe my imagination in every morning. Sucking on batteries is a sad thrill. Putting pasta on the rice shelf of a supermarket, is sad but these days after lemon zest verbs that caught origin of my first laugh,  I moved my Proust swimming through the dark webs of thread thinning time – I’m always reading Proust but I never finish him. I slide down his greased ink words to Into pooled dark, deep within hidden recesses undisturbed by the fattest bluebottles, that free of the setting sun, into the hungry mouth of the heart before falling asleep, dreaming of petticoats and sorrow.       In kingdoms of nerves and veins, so thick they form columns, bodies loosened from bones...

  SEPTEMBER 19, 2022 Share We had a problem. It was an ant problem. Normally considered a common problem. They’d get in through a crack in the window or a hole in the wall or through the plumbing or escape from our most banal dreams. Still, there they were, and they were a problem. There are some who suggest various solutions for an ant problem. Chemicals. Close the window. Move to a new apartment, new city, new society. But they are all wrong. Why? Because they see this problem as something to be solved and then to move on from. You cannot solve such problems. So we learned to live with the ants. We set up a family committee to manage the “ant situation” (calling it a problem was no longer allowed). Every day the committee would discuss the various ways to keep the ant situation well managed within certain parameters and in certain sectors of the apartment where it was deemed acceptable to have ants. The ant committee also went on to suggest other ways we could arrange the ways we...

SEPTEMBER 16, 2022 Share After a long nap sometimes, you wake up feeling like you’ve been slapped by a different day. A week of stress. It’s a week of stress or it’s a week of nothingness. And that is stressful too. Activity doesn’t always breed value. Sometimes you feel just as hopeless for working hard. I was meant to see Karn this evening. I send him a few texts as a walk around the empty house with no ideas. The thing to do in these situations is always drink. I don’t know what to do tonight. And I’m alone. I have five books on the go at once. I can’t read them all. I didn’t read for all of August. Is my brain still able to put the words in the right place? Words… I need to finish that book. Karn was supposed to come to Father’s Day today. He’s Dadless, like so many. Thankfully, not myself. And I’m willing to share. But Karn didn’t sleep last night. I don’t know the full story. I get a message from Darren. “Have you heard from Karn today?” “Yeah, why?” I don...

SEPTEMBER 10, 2022 Share    Garry Kasparov doesn’t need sleep; Garry Kasparov is always dreaming. Dreaming of this moment, the moment when he is supposed to save mankind.     Bam bah dah da da, bam bah dah da.     Garry Kasparov has the weight of the world on his shoulders. Like one of the gods of old. But not one of the Greek gods. Not Atlas, because Garry Kasparov is not Greek. Garry Kasparov is from Azerbaijan.     He raises his hand over the board. It hovers near one of the pawns. The e4 pawn. Then, shaking his head, he withdraws it, wiping the sweat from his brow with his other hand.     Bam bah dah da da, bam bah dah da.     They’re coming for him, the cocks. Coming from every angle, little robotic hovering cocks. Garry Kasparov needs to make a move soon. Before they get near. Before the cocks stop him. He raises his hand again and grabs the pawn, immediately regretting his decision. No going back though. Now that it’s be...

  SEPTEMBER 7, 2022 Share Sometimes I drink a glass of water like a staring contest, It pours into me and I pour myself into it— If it were endless I think I might stay there forever. My tongue dries in my mouth Like my eyes in their sockets Just thinking of it, I could scream to the heavens… but I won’t  Instead I’ll raise a glass and scream into it as it screams into me and I’ll drink it until it’s gone and if it’s never gone then I’ll never stop drinking  And then I’ll breathe.   Crisp My dry tongue dances on the kind of air I breathe when I have to stop drinking. I haven’t stopped drinking this poem yet I’ll tell you when I do  If. Written by  Steph Wright

  AUGUST 28, 2022 Share There are these days when the sky is dark but all else underneath seems, looks just as bright as if immediately after a late spring sunshower or right before a hurricane. I woke up late today, though, and don't know which this is. Only last year a tornado touched down on Old Best Road and it was the first to hit our county in over a decade. The world has already changed and I'm not so sure what to do. My father is the youngest of three by five years, my mother the second oldest of eight. In a beautiful Victorian house with commensurately ugly values my old man was brought up, and in a small home the siding of which was always well kept my mother spent her youth with a mother who worked and a father who once tried. She went to charm school and he earned an athletic scholarship to a D-1 university even further upstate.  My parents did not meet each other until they were in their middle thirties and had all opportunity not to have had to. Dad was scouted b...

  AUGUST 26, 2022 Share    It’s quiet up here. Picture an observation deck, over a container terminal at night. Except in this Port, there are no gangs of stevedores, nor cranes. The containers move on their own. At the birth of this technology, it took ten minutes to move a container. Now, you miss it mid-blink. I select the boxes that I need, and type the command. Nothing happens. I had to know it wouldn’t be easy to disappear.  *     “How much are we talking?"  I typed.     Then—     “Keep your bounty, Nemo. We’ll come for you when we need it.”      Like a fool, I breathed relief. I needed my earnings, for her. I have yet to figure out how to transmute them without flagging myself in the Port, but knowing they’re there makes me feel safe. The only reason I stayed this long is because I’ve tried to act as I would be treated; which is not only absurd because it’s Old World romance, but because few people wield the ki...