Publications

Where’s Walden III

An anthology of works by the participants in the 2003 Where’s Walden? SummerWrite Day Camp for Children & Youth

Works by Jeb Henrie

Character and Point of View

I am in my bathroom but I am not taking a shit or a piss. I look through the crack in the door at two crew-cut thugs in leather jackets prowling around my three-room flat. They are Gerry Steel’s goons and they have come to do a job on me, presumably for Gerry’s recently deceased dog whom I had the pleasure of killing. Gerry loved that dog, probably more than anything, and its death was a huge blow to his confidence. Now he’s sent two boys over to cut me up and teach me a lesson. Bad idea.

Criminal

I am a criminal
I cannot live.
I am a criminal
I cannot breathe.
I am a criminal,
My mind is poison
For you to swallow.
My eyes are knives,
My soul is hollow.

Untitled

I had a list, but the toad of my dreams threw it into a flame overhead. So I threw myself, splash, whoosh in the rising waves of the butterfly. But suddenly, the afternoon sun pickled by dream and weighted down like the thick, wet din. I see a thunderstorm without a sure thing, like two baby blues from Sicily without a terminal, flow like a bird with no wings or a fish with a mirror, loathe to the image of itself outside itself. Don’t be a slave to the dancing love of war, lightning on my finger tips illuminate the menacing clouds, desperate and pleading across the sands of the desert down to the ocean. Death. Green scale like eyes holding my hand with a grip like nicotine, silky but painful, a computer of flesh to snort up the nose of God. There is no firefly in the night sky, without the sickly buzz of titans and glowing vicious sons. Leprous with the skins like sunset. Lavender I die upon the rocks.

< Gaelyn Galbreath • Where’s Walden III • Julie Pettine >

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