There was something in the pressure and the urgency that made her smile, and then laugh. It was like carrying heavy furniture while someone made a joke--the effectiveness of the joke seemed directly proportional to the weight of the furniture. What was it

nothing can stop a group of genteel Southern women from a card game, and divine intervention makes one's participation in such an event quite worthwhile

I like to think of my poetry as fungus, sprouting out of the dank and fertile soil of my imagination.

Lighter-than-air flight was back. The skies of the coast were alight with colorful balloons, dirigibles, and zeppelins tethered to their docking towers along the beach, the huge aircraft bobbing in the breeze up and down the coast for miles,…

I'm a librarian. A reader. I identify as a four-eyed person. I've always worn glasses. I got my first pair in the second grade. It was a miracle! The blurry world I'd inhabited all my life suddenly came into focus. I could see the blackboard! I could read street signs! I…

This is an older story that was inspired by research on naming conventions while trying to find record of my own ancestors in the Ukraine. I did not find them. Instead I was inspired to write this.

Pa grasps my fingers, odd because he's never held my hand and he's dead ten years anyway.

Rough sonnet about faded love

"Every single thing ... " Hunk Hokum pronounced from the stage, flexing his muscles and prancing around in his red pseudo-loincloth, "has been totally scripted ... and ... every action ... has been ... preplanned-out ... in advance!"

I usually idle by Spades Check Cashing on 8th Ave. and catch folks that way. The Homestead cops, they moved stations from a little up Amity to down on 7th, which is closer to Spades, but they leave me alone. I've drove jitneys almost ten years. Only been cited twice,…

Poppy de Witte was content to spend her summers in Cape Cod, where her family owned a small beach house considerably less stifling than their spacious apartment on Park Avenue.

She loved me once. When we were young and the world revolved slowly in our hands. She never said as much, but she did. I knew by the way she moved, the looks, the whispers in the dead of night that carried only to my ears. We spent weeks on that beach in…

He ran his forefinger round the rim of the lid then sucked at his fingertip. The texture's like chalk, he thought, it tastes of earth. He hadn't anticipated this — but dipped his finger in again and swallowed. It was like scraping his tongue against a blackboard on…

I was a Cub Scout, and the face of God was a joke that was told to my little pack. The joke went as thus:

It was Brad, for short; or so he would say. But really his name was Bradford, and he was a writer. He had almost always lived in New York. He was only half-white. His mother had run away with a black man in the sixties. Her father had told her to never come back to…