It was always almost Christmas. The sun slept on the horizon with the stars salting the other side of the sky. Nothing moved but the Earth, and everything on it by proxy. Alarms sang in the workers’ dreams, operatic death scenes of wage-slave heroes, timecards held high like talismans. The compost heap turned to worms. Trashcans flowed with wine and every break-up stalled at goodbye. In our hands, the dying flowers never died.
Andrew Kozma's poems appear in Rogue Agent, Redactions, and Contemporary Verse 2, while his fiction appears in Apex, ergot, and Seize the Press. His first book of poems, City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press. You can find him on Bluesky at @thedrellum.bsky.social and visit his website at andrewkozma.net.