Lydia Polgreen Is the Best

TAKE NOTES Here in Appalachia, they just kill the trans kids. After torturing them. I’ve seen gasoline poured on them. People looked down. At their feet. People walked away. No one would help this screaming, naked kid. I picked up a rug and wrapped him in it and got him…

Tim Barrus: Year of the Hyena

Tim Barrus: Year of the Hyena

CPR

I would not be worth – all of this – high action traction where the arch of the story itself could explode from pure adrenaline. That tone from word one to the end, lightem up, up, up. Litem up, up, up. I am glad people can coordinate and go for…

There Lurks a Darkness

I left him there because we have gone through this fifty times.

How many times can I bail him out of detention before they finally have had their fill of him. Boys like him in Appalachia are a dime a dozen. He needs help. Not prison. Where do you think most rapes of boys happen. It happens in the very institutions we…

Tim Barrus: Spoons

People ask me why I am doing this one. This book of Getting Out of Dodge. Dirt Bike Town. People have been all over my ass about writing that looks at the deep sense of loss in Appalachia. I’m not doing poverty porn. That would be easy. Right now, I’m…

I Could Not Find My Voice Or My Blog

You Have Blinded Me This entire missive has been written on a phone. Kinda like as it happens because I simply cannot look people in the eye. I appear to be typing because I am writing a book and I know where all the ATMs are. If you haven’t ridden…

WE ARE THE CUNTS

I am a communist. I am a cunt. I am here to be around. You want complexity. I have none. I am a very stupid person lashing out my fingers from my cell of stones and layers and lapses in our memories od the way it used to be. Who…

He Wears His Socks To Bed As Well

BONDAGE

I never really got photographers who had to control everything from light to grain on TriX. I just slept-walked through it. Most professions have rituals I just don’t get. My brain refuses to conceed that what they do is important. But it has to be. Because they do it. And…

And Edges of the Zero Gate

The dismal sky burns the tongues with scorn. Languages. Never savage chaos as it walks the moon beach shore. Coiling in the darkness, it was like remembering our cells of faint shadows and it’s time to go. Any whore will get it. You and I both know.   

Waffle House

Never In One Place Too Long

you were the magic of the moment/ it was a small cabin, after all/ who said there were easy answers/ i’m all the stories i write about/ how is that possible/ you don’t get it, you never did, you never will/ i’m supposed to have all these filters, the new…

The Best Subversive Is No Subversiveness

Diversity times one hundred. Subversiveness times ten. A deep dive. As if matter and antimatter can exist in the same solar system. When. In fact, they can. The stereotypes ignore the power of diversity, and the complexity of our second selves. We all have multiple identities. How do we get…

sun glasses

Going Rogue

the old incarnation, and then some peyote with the poets, who are you this time, pills and spills, blings and things, i was there that night you pierced your vagina with a silver ring/ glistens some say it’s been done with frost/ to dream a net made of stinging nettles/…

esta era la habitación en la que te volviste loco

Prepare Yourselves

Tim Barrus, New York Times Opinion: Prepare to see very difficult images. The sound of packing bags that have been packed and unpacked by journalists many times. A river of blood is coming, and much of it is going to be the blood of girls and women. Who know what’s…

shoplifting

you could take it into public      on the night of a mission saving the world was like      shoplifting with stuff shoved down our pants next to our      balls they could search us but they knew we would      blackmail them and blackmailing adults who      wanted to touch us we dared them…

And skies and skies.

Little Baby

what wind will hold for tomorrow’s whispers of a snare of sky

I AM HIS HOLE

It takes an edge. He can always apply cocaine around the lips to numb them. We do indulge in product. So what. Product. Fist. Hole. What else does it take. Yeah. I know. Dick.

upstairs in our bed

what sort of old stone house is this with its memories of the old people playing cards downstairs while we pretended sleep the kind of sleep lost somewhere between the morning and the mystical, the musical, and the misbehaved

THE DAY WAS STRANGE

We did fish. Now and then. But it was about us. There was no us. It would never be allowed. The boat smelled hot with oak.