a very old man in a camo baseball cap moves through fayette mall like the last monkey among machines a mortal before the multicolored pantheon of waifish models leering from the forever 21 storefront he is an artifact, a rusted axe blade jammed in the gears of a woodchipper girls in tiny fringed shorts slither around his legs like snakes with plexiglass fangs when he was a boy he watched his father break a runt puppy’s neck, tell him mercy was a bone shard severing the spinal cord so quick and clean he was a god once, his kind now a stout brown woman’s errant stride knocks his walking cane askew things weren’t supposed to change like this, all at once like a rug pulled from beneath his feet.
Serena Devi is an eighteen-year-old poet and screenwriter from Lexington, Kentucky. She plans to study journalism at NYU in Fall 2016.