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The perfectly banal postcards...

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“There are so few uses for Crisco, that to keep it in the house seems an unnecessary temptation,” said my health teacher.

Amanda Palmer

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Amanda Palmer's explaining the eyebrow thing. An altercation with someone at Roadrunner, or maybe old boyfriend shit to burn— She's animated but he's losing signal, filling in the blanks himself. Whatever, it won't light at first, and then WHUMP and she…

Meeting for a Drink

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But the profligate are blameless now Those who conflate sex and love the way dumber animals mistake heat for light have moved freely back to some primal zone where if I’m felt to be contradictory to the surroundings it’s because I wanted t

Examination of Faith (And the Big Bang)

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The marble, it's just there. I can't explain how it got there (or when), all I know is that everything is in that marble. By "everything," I mean every thing. Your breakfast? It's there.

Another Ending

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you tell a stranger's story...

Waves of Memory

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"Sometimes things just don’t go as planned. It doesn’t mean anyone is to blame - It just is."

The Bowery Scene (Memoir, 1981; edited by Charlotte Curtis)

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It is easy to look out on the Bowery and say, "There are the bums." Encountering one, however, even one who asks to "bum a quarter" or tells you he's "on the bum" the word "bum" slips away in one's mind...

Dream Boats

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The Inauguration Day Windstorm had blown out half the downtown lights to celebrate its twenty-first birthday. Two old friends flecked with gray snow and white hair sat on the boulders that kept the Sound from sweeping away Myrtle Edwards Park. Look at all the…

The Dead

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The dead want you to calm down.They are quite fine, and don't needyour post-mortem tears, the flowers and veils; their names mispronounced by preachers. None of your catechisms will do -- especiallyfor the children, who know them well and need no…

Washing the dishes...

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There are certain items in the sink that are giving me an anxious feeling in my stomach.

In the Parking Lot

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Maybe they considered themselves beyond redemption, or maybe they couldn't sit for that long.

Absinthe Drinking in a Bar in Paris

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Half past six; already, through the gloom Saltwater flourish sifts from wharfs that ply Their play like girls that haunt the midnight's womb, As far it seems as walks of Barbary. Within the bar, French waitresses and sots Play dice with time awhile and rub…

Blind

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a dim wood-paneled stair leading to the ladies’ rooms, candle-lit.

the PC birds have come home to roost

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I want the luxury of hearing other people who disagree with me tell me why I’m an asshole!

I Am Not Like All The Rest: Funny Lines From Online Dating Profiles

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After becoming single at age 62, I joined an online dating site. After a year of perusing profiles and meeting men for coffee, staying single is starting to look better and better to me. But I've stayed on the site, in part for the pure enjoyment of…

children

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today on the bus/ a man in his fifties/ smiled at a baby/

The Window (Part II)

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When we saw the window, we were impressed. It was so clean and transparent that it reminded us of a new pair of glasses, everything so crisp and clear through it. It looked on to nothing. Actually it looked on to the refridgerators and a few stoves, though most of the…

M. Nerveux Chronicles: Toad Suffers a Bad Business

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Herr Toad smokin'

An Orb for a Better World

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Max sighed. Solving for x was boring, so mind numbingly boring that he didn't notice the flickering blue light hovering in his room. It crackled and popped, growing until a shimmering rectangle stretched from floor to ceiling.A hand pushed out from the rectangle, and a…

The Ritz

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After oh so many hours the eyes could only close only to view a Ritz cracker marching on a nose

Maggie

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But she didn't. It would have been no historical anomaly if she had, by the way. She played with the world like it was a toy. Sometimes I wondered if I'd wake up in a box, a victim of live internment, and scream only to be humiliated later by her laughter

The Girl I Danced With Is Now A Man

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You can't always be everything you were expected to be

Intrepid Explorer

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The Intrepid Explorer recounts his travels for the benefit of subscribers to the Magazine of the Museum of Everything

Sleepwalker

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I may as well have been sleepwalking. Either way, I had no opportunity to admire the moonlight flooding into the long corridors, illuminating the stag heads and painted cheeks of long-dead ancestors.

Urgencies

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...it was moving toward me from an oblique angle somewhere behind, steadily, relentlessly.

Trip the Rime

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politics only add to assault and distract

Dinner with Someone Who Fucks Someone Else

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say no / to me / and devastate me / and I will take it / as god's will / to drown me / in a vat / of my own / entrails

Movie Conference, 1963

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Suddenly the producer, Irving, tosses a new idea into the discussion, an idea for a possible film. Then the writer, Herbert, does the talking. He performs, in fact, puts on a one-man show. The idea! The idea! It's…

Citadel

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Last night we slept with books in the bed.

Packing

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I left Iowa in august when the air was thick and sticky. I had been there three years minus a few days when the boy I'd been sleeping with packed almost everything I owned into my car and waved goodbye. In Baltimore I had few friends and a job teaching English at a…