When you’re dying
the country is the place to be,
but when you’re alive
there’s a furious dream
where the city
sinks into a thousand voices
with an echoed smile
seething like yellow tongues flashing through the horizon.
Boxers, ravers, mothers and leather clad gangsters relish a concrete-clad conspiracy, while
junkyard maniacs fill the streets with
fear
in hidden corridors
powered by a Columbo-style hunch.
Potions and remedies hang from dimly lit
porches like Christmas wreaths
and who knows what lurks behind each front door?
Always remember to peel off your fingerprints
before entering—
your cloaked identity ensures a slick getaway and
yes, the rivers are sick and the air is a ten-ton weight on a paraplegic’s back but
trains are nothing but graves moving out of the suburbs
and they will watch you as the fields and flowers
encroach and pop
with surgical disease.

…

Tim Frank’s short stories have been published in Bending Genres, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. He was runner-up in The Forge Literary Flash Fiction competition ‘22. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions ’23.

Twitter: @TimFrankquill