Nathaniel T. Hughes

the bustle of skies unbuttoning beer cap dresses. fashions blinking eyes, the circadian rhythms born sideways, blurred memories lace our shoes. we're dragging along the gift of hangovers, stealing teardrops along the way; we'll laughingly never make it there

Bruno, Saskatchewan: A town where farmers make their peace with nature Percy Schmeiser planted here, using the purest spirits as guidance to plant his seeds and breath the soil that gives us all commonality and stability. Here his seeds grew, stretched in the sweat from decades of dirt and plight, resting with the strength of stars that calmed them in the daunting night. For decades they whistled at him until the silent slit of night; it let him know they appreciated all he'd done, and if that wasn't enough to make him smile the whole way home, they'd bow to him as his shadow disappeared under the bending red horizons then posing for him in the pictures frames of grated kitchen windows so he could watch them play til' dawn. There was something magical about this yellow haven: The camaraderie. The commitment. The circadian calms, almost as golden as a Mayan throne. The reflection like lightening in the sky; it was connections to magnetic...

The backyard hurries to burry the end of a drag; she hears the echo of an eight and a half inch sole on faded neon black: The pillow of footsteps coming home The little pockets of the street that collect his cigarette ash like rain. They're praying for failed discoveries: The yellow residue that bites at the webbing of peace fingers, The nonexistent twitch of their lips, before the tainted kiss, Like the worlds wasted their nights on ABC sitcoms. Like the drift of steam from hot Octobers on ice. Like the coat hook hold on a season 11 years ago. There's a conversation starving in the attic of their dreams; Dead ends still being filed with the gritty overbite of teeth. It's where the dusty pages of the bible taught them how to lie to themselves, taught them how to negate distances of love with god; His thumb ended up closer to the Marb Reds than her side of the bed. Her mind on the USA Golds he won't ever know about. Their smoldering like gu...

The waves were impatient as she stared out; her smile cracked with mud like it was a dirty place to dip the wick - a purple hazed blowjob that would quickly turn down all the cum, before any dick could ever reach it's zenith. Only on late nights when it rained, when the precipitation crawled like sweat on skin, and Ontario's waters steamed harshly in the air, would her panties drip off, through the glides of talented motion. She was nothing less than a Scandinavian princess, waiting and ready to conquer, floating her pussy like a seaborne ship, head on through the waves; She maintained a shallow smile, a voyeuristic grin bent upside down, arms crushing the breath beneath propeller toes, always two strides ahead the gravity of the moon; And as the blueberry droplets fell off, physics no longer worked as a math of wavy hair, and the sugary whiplash of a Thursday night was finally felt again. - Nathaniel T. Hughes, September 2007

This house is stark space empty. Josh and Tim danced out through the wind cracks; Ryan and Alex tried, but left, what seems like giga years ago. I've only blinked twice since then; and only to the tick of the stars yawning at the moon outside my window. It's weird, but their imbalance is holding the earth up tonight. Here, I've been drawing circles for hours, lost without corners; I've been trying to crumble the lines, accrete it into something clever so I can get lost in the sphere it will become, beside the corner of bed. Perhaps there I will feel the home I've been longing, my rip in space-time that's beyond a sifting parallax of closure. -Nathaniel T. Hughes, March 2008

Watched the humidity asphyxiate the moon, saw its definition offer guns to an insipid apricot monotone. Standing there with skin exposed, I touched my rug-burned knees through tattered jeans, and thought about how I needed something more than this. Something more than crickets choking to their suicide, and hunger tight-roping my muscles into spasms. The boredom from two days without sex, and a hand that didn’t have to find, clever things to do, from a quarrel of time zones that google couldn't logically map abandoned me with the night downtown sang to us from inside. And now all I have is stale jazz, And a butter knife. It seems it will be awhile, waiting for a transmission, out of Prague. -Nathaniel T. Hughes, July 2007