The following is an excerpt from Smith’s forthcoming acid western novel.

Clem is a worldly fella, but he’s not much for talking so I get fragments here and there. Got to the West from Russia the

J’s task was to ensure each of 3 men that they had a connection with a girl.

She had sent me a video of herself in the bath listening to Elvis, and I watched that over and over.

She wanted to go under beautifully, before decomposition

Forgive yourself, as there is no other option but to forgive yourself.

I’d love to keep her locked away in legends, but she walks and grows among us.

Fun Legs

Vaguely, like in somebody else’s dream,
one of those strange cell-phone settings ringing.
No it’s the doorbell. Forgot we had one.
I slip on my Hyatt Regency robe.

It’s almost happy

I dreamt of the mystery woman, still faceless, and I woke up haunted.

Have you ever wondered why that voice in your head telling you to try harder doesn’t sound like your voice?

She bites at a knuckle hoping to draw her private, savage joy. What’s it taste like? You don’t want to know. You can’t imagine how hard it is to stop after.

You harness the light like the love of a good horse, your word is law among the stars and the sand, patron saint of all things misunderstood in the daytime.

She’s gone. Stop knocking.

What did I do today.

I walked through Costco
dissociated,
watching a woman who looked like me
push a cart
like this is the world.
Like this is what we’re

His unbuttoned shirt, his summer breakfast. The gesture of his mouth was the opening of unsaid words.

The gigolos texted me back while my mom and I watched Zootopia 2

Fury Psalm 6:

Let there be a God, an earth, seasons weathered through a time
for this, for that, for breathing and for holding one’s breath.

Let there be seasons when the moon has nothing to be

Lie here with me, if only for a while.

I was on my morning jog when I saw what I believed to be a young man asleep or dead in the sand.

Sitting in his gold Toyota listening to old metal. He turned down The Accused to tell me about his diagnosis.

“The Upper East Side. For uncreative rich people who don't know the first thing about being happy,” Mom said, and I believed her.

Avery was the worst kind of people pleaser. A failed one who didn’t know how to make other people happy but attempted only to her own demise. When Sienna asked Avery if she wanted to steal, the yes

then
the eagle is healed

It is warm in the theatre. The chair is comfortable. The trailers ended and most of the films looked good. A Coca Cola ad begins playing, which is the second to last thing they show before the movie.

She walks around like a colt in a kitchen I don’t know, bluish crescent bruise on her calf flashing every couple of turns at me.

I would take you as you are and were
over all this dead air.

I met the man who would become my Uncle through an insane-clown-posse-adjacent dishwasher coworker who wanted us to star in his uncomfortably misogynistic Instagram horror movie.

I had just moved

When the sun went down, I saw the man on the sidewalk. He had fallen onto his suitcase with a shopping bag at his feet. The light turned green. A car honked behind me. I drove ahead, but a pedestrian