Status Updates From HSTQ: Summer 2026

We hadn't been fucking
for very long that summer
before she asked if I could
help her out with something.

How to be a Small Press Success

“Do you realize what you
did? Do you remember?
Do you even care?”

After the first cut

I looked
at myself
in the mirror.

I looked
pretty much
the same—

minus
a bit of lip
and some nose.

I’d been
so scared

but now

something had changed.

I saw myself
for what I truly was:

ugly,
imperfect flesh,

stretched
over bone—

hiding
behind the illusion

of a soul.

This city spills champion bartenders out from
the Lower Ninth to Pigeontown,
Gentilly, Algiers to Mid-city,
the Lower Garden District to Central City,
Seventh Ward, Treme’, Bywater
to the Irish Channel
and every corner in between.

No one wants to read this sad sack poem
pouring out of me after two glasses
of white wine,
so I imagine myself a melancholy
charmingly self-effacing
country singer
with an old song about how
I wish I hadn’t done you wrong,
and how I miss you
like I’d miss the sun