Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.

Under haze of junior-prom fog machines,
       my cells pulsed with
              non-senescence

Your hand had never fully formed, a shadow made of lint & oil. Decades pass, divination is still predicated on how long a candle lasts, how long tea sits in a cup. Coffee? I never touch the stuff.

Acting isn’t enough anymore. They should have to hurt themselves.

Please don't leave me to my joysticks!

Mama Vincenzo’s Ristorante Italiano is located in hell

I have a thing for droopy-eyed men.

here were girls who sank/ a thousand leagues beneath his hips/ and never bobbed back for air. I came ashore/ in a body of my own, crooked gate/ and piano fingers

Bill and Mary were leaving because Mary felt old, when a woman’s hand fell on his shoulder.

A sky
like an enormous
Friedrich Nietzsche-looking
manhole cover
tries to explain your mind
to you.

i challenge my body/ wearing all white/ i lay down/ only to need to sit up/ i lay down i wish i was/ my own alarm

I won’t apologize for trying to forget the days I spent with you, riding pillion on your Honda, inhaling Bombay’s foggy polluted streets, sitting on rickety wooden benches of hole-in-the-wall Indo-Chinese joints, slurping Szechwan noodles and sipping Tom Yum soup, strolling on Juhu’s wet sandy beaches, letting the ocean wash our feet.

Two weeks after the scientist’s freak exposure, a man in black arrived at his front step. It was the weekend, and the man in black brought with him a gift: a jumble of neon material he removed from

The goal of short fiction is up for debate, but it seems to me that, if a story has a single job, it is to subvert the expectations of the reader.

Tonight a boy goes to a field where he knows a horse has died.

I’m shoving fat candles into dirt,
blowtorching the wicks and tooting
horns.

I couldn’t render enough tallow
to properly honor over 4 billion years,
sorry,

you have so many hills.

I make him coffee, I make hot chocolate for his kids, and sometimes I buy his weed.

April

A cycle with seven edges
equals my dream of bicycle spokes
jutting towards the center
of an ice cream bowl. Don’t tell me
the seconds yellow took to elevate
to red isn’t

People are just the mares under their craft.

You were dead: tiny birds of glass littered the road like jeweled confetti for a New Year’s bash.

The cousin had called my thesis advisor and said something like, “Hey, film professor cousin, can you do this film for us?” and my thesis advisor was like, “Hey, no. But I know a guy who is still unemployed four months after graduation and is about to get evicted.”

Or more specifically its monster, long tail whisper in our swimming pool: in a valley girl’s mind. 

We spent that summer on Dad's couch trying not to move, because if we didn’t move we wouldn’t spend

The Great God Pan

Dibs

In Chicago, we use dibs to take
ownership of what we will never own.
Traffic cones, rusted patio chairs, strollers,
a pair of orange Home Depot buckets.
Flanking the concrete.  We

He started as a single Clay Aiken, the one we all knew with the smiling face and aw-shucks demeanor