Modern Love Story
I once fell in love with a beautiful disaster, cherished how each day she destroyed me a little, then destroyed herself a little more. I contrived new ways to believe her recycled lies. Sometimes it meant shredding logic like it was an incriminating document.Sometimes it meant concealing my confidence so it wouldn’t sustain damage. I became a man who had balls enough to say something but chose to remain silent. She never wanted to hurt me but did anyways, the sweet contagion of her brutal affection burning my tongue like poison. I nearly convinced myself to swallow it. I grinned and feigned contentment and then came a sudden shift: a latticework of defiance crafted around doubt. I unshackled my identity from its emotional chains. I rubbed my raw wrists with unfettered fingers and escaped.
Adrian S. Potter writes poetry and short fiction. He is the author of the fiction chapbook Survival Notes (Červená Barva Press, 2008) and winner of the 2010 Southern Illinois Writers Guild Poetry Contest. Some publication credits include North American Review, Jet Fuel Review, Obsidian Kansas City Voices. He blogs, sometimes, at http://adrianspotter.com/.
A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. His latest P.O.D. amazon release is an art-text hybrid, “According to the Order of Nature (We too are Cosmos Made)”, a work which takes to task the words which have been used against LGBT folks from time immemorial. In 2014 he began a webpage to gather links of his poetry being published in such zines as Great Works, Unlikely Stories, Quill & Parchment, etc., in a site called Poetry on the Line.
8-WEST PRESS 