I Mentally Rehearse Before Every Encounter…

and
if
unplanned
words—not stiff
words, or weird ones, but
simply unsure ones–come out of
me, rest assured: they’re nothing. Best put
in the garbage, like used up olive jars, not enough
of anything there to bother
with, not even juice,
just some air,
lid loose,
un
done.

Now She’s Googling How to Hose Wet Paint Off of Stucco

Oh fuck it she said and threw the brush
in the bushes. It was hot and the paint 
didn’t pop like on Pinterest. The rush
she’d had when she began turned to the faint
hope that maybe she could undo what was
on the stucco, hose it all off,  pretend
that she never attempted it, because
otherwise she was stuck with pink streaks and
drips… globs of it all over the ladder,
and spattered on the landscaping plants she 
didn’t cover up before she made her
house look like crap. It should have been easy,
it seemed simple enough, but the paint can
was heavy, the sun sweltered, her strokes ran.

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Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s work has appeared in Amazing Stories, Rock and A Hard Place, Noir Nation, Horror Sleaze Trash, Tough Poets Review, The Deadlands, Under Her Skin (Black Spot Books), Vastarien: Women’s Horror (Grimscribe Press), Fallen (Black Hare), and many other places. She is a Best New Weird Award winner. Nominations include the Pushcart, Elgin, Best of the Net and Rhysling. Her latest book is Curses, Black Spells and Hexes (Alien Buddha Press). Useless facts: her husband builds vintage choppers; thier house is haunted.