Joshua Nomen-Mutatio

“At night, when he is sure his father is sleeping, he sticks the phonograph needle in a rubber eraser and holds the eraser in his front teeth. Carefully, with his nose inches from the record, he sets the needle down. With a hiss and crackle, the music reverberates through the hollows of his mouth and throat without making a sound in the room. Ignoring the cramp in his neck, this is how he listens to his favorite records night after night.”
― Lydia Peelle, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories

“I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land

“When the sun was rising I doubted its value, as it set I lamented its loss.”
― Evan Dara, The Easy Chain

“As if the parents we were born to weren't always a matter of happenstance: an elbow jostled at a bar, a muscular hand smoothing the hair away from a blue-shadowed eye, a quick decision that this girl looks hot or that guy seems safe. We are never guaranteed that the people who fit together so deliciously in the heat of a moment can building a lasting love. And it is love, the breadth and force of being wholly, unabashedly loved — not just having two parents who look like the wax figures on a wedding cake — that affirms and redeems us. Poverty alone doesn't always spark violence. And a two-parent home isn't always the antidote. The urge to obliterate is as dark and unknowable as the hollows of our bones.”
― Laura Bogart