Dennis James Sweeney

The plane rises eastward and circles south, then west, then north. The neighborhoods are suddenly tiny below. Their tininess seems permanent. All that confusion—how do you know when one village…

My last month in Malta is curiously vacant. Most of my friends are gone and most of my commitments have finished so while the island fills with tourists I suddenly…

Then, all at once, the epiphanies arrive. Like circles and arrows in chalk on a window. Like windows in a window, quadrilaterals cut out of the transparent surface to reveal…

Everyone claps when the plane touches down, as if they didn’t expect it to. Is this standard for Bulgaria? I wonder. Should I assume the plane will explode on arrival…

My sunglasses snap on the hill up the Citadel. I’ve put them in my back pocket for a second and the whole tight jeans thing, the whole scaling hills in…

The trip to Sicily passes in a series of singularities. I’ll never replicate the moments, the moods; life is always that way, but we travel to remember the fact. When…

The guppies flap in the yellow water. Their mouths suck at the surface. They suffocate. Too many fish, too small of a bowl, even though it was beautiful at first…

Birdwolf is a new year-long project authored by the collective Entropy community. It is a collaborative online epic poem written by the Entropy community on a weekly basis. A different…

The Multipurpose Room stutters with strobe lights and small bodies jumping and dark music from the underworld of American pop. Immediately I’m back in high school: my first mixer, the…

The deck of the ferry is a fluorescent white whale in a black night that doesn’t end. Below us the engine hums, the bridge hovers above us, benches that were…

During a wakeful moment in the middle of the night, I hear the sound of fabric tearing. In the morning I see that my blue and white striped bedsheet has…

We learn about Paris on the bus north from Valletta. A speaker crackles apocalyptically from the plastic trimming overhead, trying desperately to announce the stops but sounding instead like a…

I’m tired of making meaning. Every bus sashays by like it wishes it was the one I want, but none of them is. Through the chain link fence behind the…

The red flags are finally up. I could have sworn the firing range was abandoned, from all my days running through it and seeing nothing but rebar twisted out of concrete walls, but today I hear shots, actual shots, so I keep my run inland, on the road. The shots come in a burst and stop. Then I hear no more. Past the range, I descend again into touristland. I wonder: Which way do they shoot? At the ocean, where they might hit boats? Or at the land, where they know the bullets will stop eventually, but who knows in what?