Broken bricks along the river smoothed by the current like the deep brown liver slur out for some safety from buildings that weren't, but what'd they do for me lately? Urban decay doesn't pay politicians like the dumping of toxic waste and shame they turn around onto us for a pump to their funding. Love the river, screw that bus. Anubis and Charon swapping stories at the trash fire romp, recalling the city's lost kings and charging tributes to names with dignity and psycho pomp to stoke the souls of their flame. We chisel our eroded essences on the sides of burnt-out cars, not guessing at what the lesson is.
Carson Pytell is a writer living outside Albany, New York, whose work appears in such venues as The Adirondack Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Fourth River, and The Heartland Review. He serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Coastal Shelf, and his most recent chapbooks are Tomorrow Everyday, Yesterday Too (Anxiety Press, 2022), and A Little Smaller Than the Final Quark (Bullshit Lit, 2022).
Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. His writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Rattle, The Southern Review, Fence, Texas Review and Atlanta Review among others. He also publishes the writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the literary journal Coastal Shelf.
