Once it arrived, I could no longer decipher between right and wrong. It was a delightful amnesia, fragmented completeness accompanied by anxious music. My intentions were deceptively honest, overly reckless. My soul hissed like a half-opened soda as I found myself falling in with thieves, becoming persona non-grata. I smelled like sex and whiskey, waited for the spell to break while embracing tension, the perpetual pull between desire and necessity. I sought disarray, a sermon from my soliloquy of personal mayhem, a door within me opening to a catwalk, towards impending disaster. Apathetic, anticlimactic, and antagonistic. But instead, I preached peace to the bedeviled. Whispered litanies of forged hopes. Instead, I slipped outside of reality and through locked doors, quietly.

Adrian S. Potter writes poetry and prose in Minnesota. He’s the author of the fiction chapbook Survival Notes and is currently at work on a full-length poetry collection. Some publication credits include North American Review, Roads & Bridges, Jet Fuel Review, and Kansas City Voices.