How Do You Procure Your Weed?

By Justin Karcher

After work I head to Caffe Aroma to unwind when Sean shuffles up to me needing to use my phone but most of the calls go to voicemail and as he sighs, I notice there’s a dirty baggy in his left hand and he explains he found the weed in the Jim’s Steakout parking lot in a gasoline rainbow and he makes me smell it and it smells like an abandoned auto shop but Sean looks longingly at the baggy and tells me it smells like sixth grade, how it was probably stuck to a tire, the people in the car driving all over Buffalo never knowing the high they had underneath it all and I think it’s funny how close we are to the things that will make us feel great but never know it and I really want to tell him that the weed probably wasn’t stuck to any tire and that some tired-looking submaker probably dropped it after finishing their shift but why, let people have their hero’s journey because when I glance over Sean’s shoulder out the window I see the panhandling sun starting to set and in a few hours I know we’ll all be chasing highs in low places, what it’s like coming up from the underground and not making it all the way.

Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright born and raised in Buffalo, NY.

Photo provided by author.

A brief pause...

We're taking a short break from publishing sentences for the rest of the year––see ya'll in January 2025.

Why Does It Always Start Raining When I’m Crying?

By Bojana Stojcic

Because when Bowie died, I heard thunders whirring in the air like choppers, music turning into indistinct chatter over the radio, which left me oddly detached from it all and it’s then that I became a hard-swearing, full-blooded agnostic, or possibly an atheist, and god knows I tried to take part in the present, even contemplate the future, it’s just that it was easier to understand the past, because with time I began to develop fear of the unknown which turned into fearing to go out alone, then go back into the house, fall asleep, because when your bizarre little habits progress into a full-on dependency, you know you got a problem, like every time someone looks at me the way I don’t want to be looked at, I start to tidy the contents of my purse or run my fingers over the back cover of the book I pretend to be reading, dots jumping about on the page like grasshoppers, because there is nowhere to run, no one to run to, so you run into yourself, because at home I gnaw chicken bones like I would my own, trail my hand over the side of my son’s ship, thinking there’s gotta be a way to sail it safely through the narrow passage, and when it stops raining at last, the sun holds me naked on its knee like a baby while I breathe breathe breathe, because I know that after the rain, crocodiles yawn like mantraps.

Bojana Stojcic is a teacher and writer from Serbia, living in Germany with her boys and a bunch of friendly ghosts.

Photo by Bojana Stojcic.