Hard up,
I rented a stairway landing.
Eight by six, the price was right.
Roped off a pedestrians’ passway.
Sold my etchings, then clothes,
next blood, one or two kidneys.
I shouldn’t have harvested
that poor man,
but once you buy the
chloroform
and surgical tools…
Pricing studio apartments
today.
Todd Mercer won the Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest and took 2nd and 3rd place of the Kent County Dyer-Ives Prizes. His chapbook Box of Echoes won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. Mercer’s poetry and fiction appears in The Lake, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Thema, Blue Collar Review, Right Hand Pointing, Apocrypha & Abstractions, Cease, Cows, Dunes Review and Eunoia Review.