Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

The sound of sirens had been rendered dead stimulus after years of constancy. It was like living next to a waterfall of alarm.

Empathizing with hunger is not the same thing as living inside of it.

Exactly how long can you stand on a street corner showing two drug dealers your scar-tissue-induced radical penis curvature? The answer is twelve seconds. After that it feels weird.

Someone was reaching for god-like power. But who? And why? The default response, emitted from cell towers at frequencies below conscious perception: Who are you to ask?

Learning how to force something broken to continue to perform its primary function is called a workaround.

I thought the sound of thoughtless, whooping grief was coming from a neighbor’s apartment, but the wailing disappeared when I stopped to catch my breath.

I realized that the paralysis felt in nightmares is a premonition of how you feel the moment you’re about to die

the world of the hated, hunted, and haunted.

the human mind as a trap, cruel in its self-sustaining tyranny.

Fifty story towers loomed over the street, but if you tilted your head and looked straight up, you could still see the night sky.

Something named is more easily defined, infiltrated, and broken.

his regular voice: low, male, scratchy and worn, the sound of a larynx run ragged by too many nights of shouting acid-head epiphanies.

“Nothing’s real. It’s just the things you think you know. Perception is a web of lies that helps our bodies float through space.”