by Sebastian Javier Blanchette

the bowls sit there stacked and stupid white ones, blue ones, 
even pink ones ones with little flowers that might look nice 
if plated nicely

too shallow, he thinks the shoyu would pool at the bottom very much like life always drowning out

at the home goods place on Tuesday
 he picks up a ceramic thing deep enough, sure but the diameter is all off the ramen would sit wrong in it and what’s the point of a bowl if the ratio is always flawed?

the salesgirl asks if he needs help he says no he’s been doing this for months

the discount store downtown more bowls hundreds of them and not one worth a shit

this one’s too wide that one’s too narrow this one has a rim that curves weird that one would make the katsu sit all funny

he goes home with nothing a sound of a crow crying far away in the distance car locks with the same beep

his girlfriend asks what took so long “the usual,” he says

Saturday morning, different store same aisle, different bowls same problem

a woman reaches past him grabs a plain white bowl doesn’t even look at it twice just tosses it in her cart and walks away

she’ll never know what she’s missing

the truth is maybe there is a right bowl somewhere in some store we haven’t tried yet

and he’ll drive us there some weekend and the weekend after that

because a man looking for the perfect bowl isn’t crazy he’s just got a dream

and when he finds it goddamn we’ll both eat like kings
 cause you know damn well id buy one too

so tomorrow he’ll drive to the Navy Exchange place or maybe that shop deep downtown where everything costs too much

and he’ll pick up another bowl feel its weight imagine donburi in it ramen in it loco moco in it

and maybe put it back down

or maybe just maybe this is the one

either way I’ll be there hoping the best for him always

by Sebastian J. Blanchette

My nephew breathes, and I see the future with the same cold precision I've always possessed. He will surpass me. In every way that matters, he will eclipse what I have been. Not through some sacred hope or blind optimism, I deal in certainties, and this is one of them. The spark in him burns brighter already, untested but pure, waiting only for fuel and direction. My role is not to dim that flame with false modesty or shield it so completely it never learns to roar.

He knows nothing yet of corruption or compromise, nothing of the sophisticated dance through darkness I've perfected. Good. Let him learn it from me, let my eyes become his eyes, my hard-won understanding become his inheritance. I will teach him every trick, every sharp truth I've gathered. How to see through pretense. How to stand unmoved when others falter. How to flourish in spaces where weaker men crumble. These are gifts worth giving, knowledge earned in fire.

But I won't shelter him from all pain,that would be a disservice, a weakening. He needs to know the world's teeth, needs to feel its bite enough to grow strong, to develop the calluses that will let him grip harder and reach farther than I ever could. What I can do, what I will do, is stand between him and the needless cruelty, the crushing weight that breaks rather than tempers. Let him face evil, but not alone. Not yet. Not until he's ready to meet it with the full force of what he's becoming.

The mothers of old sang warnings about what watched from beyond the firelight. Let them sing about him one day. Let his name be the one that carries weight, that makes the corrupt think twice, that blazes through the darkness I merely navigated. I am, if nothing else, a haughty man, and my greatest pride now is this: knowing with absolute certainty that he will be more.

More clever, more powerful, more real than I ever managed. He has the advantage of starting with everything I learned the hard way. My cynicism will sharpen his sight without souring his strength. My understanding of the world's flaws will armor him without making him brittle. Where I flourished in corruption's garden, he will rule it, bend it, reshape it to his will.

This is not sentimentality. This is recognition. I know my limits and I know myself better than all, and I know greatness when I see it taking its first breath. My nephew doesn't need me to be soft or reformed. He needs me to be exactly what I am: the devil who will teach him every dark truth, the haughty bastard who will hand over every weapon in his arsenal, the clear eyed guide who understands that real love isn't protection from all harm, but preparation for inevitable battle.

Let my experiences be his foundation. Let my tricks become his arsenal. Let my hard won sight show him where the traps lie and where the real power pools. And then, and this is the part that almost resembles humility, though I'd never call it that, let him take all of it and go further than I ever dared. Let him succeed where I merely survived. Let him build where I only understood how to navigate ruins.

The fierce devotion I spoke of, the kind worth more than multitudes, I give it now to him. Not as worship, but as investment. As the deliberate choice of a man who has never doubted his own power to recognize when something greater is rising. My time is ending. His is just beginning. And I will make damn sure that when he steps into the world I've shown him, he does so with every advantage I can forge, every truth I can name, every ounce of strength I can lend.

My nephew will not stumble through his power like those old gods. He won't need to. He'll walk with certainty because I will have mapped the terrain. He'll strike with precision because I will have taught him where to aim. And when he surpasses me, when, not if, I will watch with the satisfaction of a man who knows he played his part perfectly.

Let others build empires for themselves. I am building something better: a king who will rule what I only observed, a force who will reshape what I merely understood. This small flame, this untested spark, he is the reason my considerable powers were worth gathering in the first place. So he could inherit them, refine them, and wield them with a mastery I can only begin to imagine.

My time is done. His has just begun. And that, more than any personal victory, is exactly as it should be.

By Sebastian J. Blanchette

Those were the days when mothers sang warnings to their babes about the crimson eyes that watched from beyond the firelight, when such songs carried the weight of truth rather than mere superstition. Children learned respect for the dark not from empty threats, but from knowing that something ancient and hungry truly did stir in the spaces between shadows. How I long for the gods of those forgotten ages, not the preening deities who now scramble for worship like actors desperate for applause, but the old ones who stumbled through their immortality with wine-stained lips and hearts still capable of surprise. They were flawed and foolish, yes, but they valued the fierce devotion of a single faithful soul over the hollow adoration of multitudes. They walked among us not as distant idols but as wayward family, powerful and proud and beautifully, terribly human in their divine imperfection.

The world has grown too knowing, too measured. I would trade all our careful certainties for one true mystery, one genuine wonder that could not be explained away or catalogued or tamed.

By Sebastian J. Blanchette

By Sebastian J. Blanchette

the void held you like a bad habit, then flicked you into this blinking hellhole they call living.

but you were something once a sparkplug god, lit up on your own voltage, dancing naked through storms, unbound by fate or karma, speaking only to the nothingness that nursed you, cradled you before you learned to crawl, before you were crowned with your own small divinity.

now you're rusting under someone else's sky, a busted signal bleeding oil in a world built by clerks and cowards your body filing complaints, liver sick of your bullshit, lungs wanting a transfer, heart writing manifestos in Morse code, chemicals marching their private war while you rattle down the freeway like a '73 Impala held together with duct tape and despair.

but that light in you? the one they'd sell their mothers to bottle? it still burns.

fed on bourbon, grief, and fuck-you stubbornness, a busted bulb burning overtime, the kind that makes cockroaches scatter, draws hungry moths and jealous eyes, spinning even as the bearings moan because you don't go gentle, never learned how, never wanted to.

they drilled you down to scaffolding, stitched prayers into your spine like staples in a suicide note, left you coughing up chlorine while the world checked its phone and walked away.

your eyes have always been traitors blurred snapshots, fogged-up film from a life you never signed up for but whiskey lines up the ghosts, makes them walk straight for a minute or two, the only ceasefire in the war.

and still you write. you write. on backs of bills, on receipts for things you didn't need but bought to feel something, because time's not running out they are, filing into their prefab lives while you stare past the ceiling, past the stars, into that dead space between constellations.

the universe grins, shows its yellow teeth, calls you a bug, dares you to flicker out but you keep the bulb alive just to spite it, wearing your shadows like second skin, pressing your face into the warm, soft nothing that hugs you like an old friend with bad breath.

you rage, you burn, you rave against the slow suffocation of everything they call normal.

while wise men nod and accept the dark, you want to fork lightning even if your words only spark in puddles. while good men drown in their reflections, you claw at the surface, refuse to let the water close over your head. while wild men chase the sun with burnt hands, you keep singing even as your voice cracks, even as the sky shrugs you off.

because you're not here to slip away quiet, not here to fold into the dark like a well-behaved shadow.

you swagger through their accusations, rehearse your lines like a two-bit actor in a play nobody paid to see, and they call you arrogant these sleepwalkers with their HOA dues who've never rehearsed death in front of a mirror until it blinked back.

but maybe maybe it is just you. the last feral light in this energy-efficient zoo, the only fool who won't go gentle, still staring through strip malls and sermons toward that place where suns go to die.

not even six of them could outshine your last fuck-you flare, the magic of pure defiance burning in a body that betrays you, the alchemy of turning pain into light, of spinning gold from the lead of your magnificent wreckage.

still burning. still wrong. still real. still you

the last stubborn light in a world that never asked for one, paying your rent in scabs and ash, leaving bloodied napkins behind as the only currency that matters, until the blackout swallows everything else and discovers you were the magic all along.



By Sebastian J. Blanchette

I was never perfect more like a fight that ended in separation. something cosmic and fucked something born from a bet. a punchline that fell flat.

you think you feel my warmth? maybe. could be me or could be the whiskey or the shadow of something that once mattered to somebody. I kiss my demons like it’s all I have left. hold tight like the world’s ending and somehow it never does.

they told me I was worthless and I bought it. hell, I still buy it but I made worthless bleed. I made it howl I made it chant my name like the final prayer in an empty church.

sometimes I slip into your thoughts like a dream you wish you’d forgotten. like that metal taste in your mouth right after impact. I’m not haunting you. I just need somewhere to crash.

never owned a place just bad timing and that kind of laugh that splits your ribs and sounds like your mother crying into a towel.

I ate the past and threw it back up in every language they forgot to fear. I made old gods stutter and young ones weep. I found prayer where even silence gave up. called it magic. called it mine.

so how does this finish? with me? maybe. or maybe it doesn’t finish. maybe it just keeps turning like a game with no winners left. toward a place where everything and nothing get drunk together and forget why they even cared.

By Sebastian J. Blanchette

A stray cat blinks, eyes like chipped stone. I drink from the cracked mirror of the world, waiting for something holy to crawl out of the dark and name me.

By Sebastian J. Blanchette

You don’t see what I see. This leaf, this godforsaken leaf isn’t some song of golden days, but a remnant of something lost, trampled under the boots of those who never looked back.

With your clean hands and ivory teeth, your love is woven fine, silk-threaded, unspoiled. Mine is a war-horn’s cry, a blade buried deep, a storm that leaves nothing standing.

You follow the path, straight and true. I take the broken road, where shadows whisper and forgotten gods laugh. I break the rules just to feel the sting.

And I am bold enough to say it as the wind prowls, a mangy wolf at my heels. Nobody sings of this moment, but the universe knows I was here. I have left my mark upon its bones.

Clairvoyant when drunk, master of the long con, wearing borrowed names like the wandering faeries. All this deception just to carve out a single truth.

There’s beauty in the wreckage, if only you’d stop trying to make everything so fucking pretty.

By Sebastian J. Blanchette

This ocean, this womb of night, swallows my screams like sugar. I am alone as ever a man can be, dark-shouldered against the darker sky.

The moon, that red and terrible god, burns away my skin, my sins, leaving only bone-truth behind. How holy this drowning feels.

I have come to this shore to be cleansed, where waves speak in tongues and madness is just another word for seeing too clearly in the dark.

By Sebastian J. Blanchette