The bedroom was still as our conversation dissolved into a heavy silence broken only by the ticking of the clock on her night table and the occasional sob that hadn't yet been swallowed in her pillow. I stubbed out my cigarette and leaned forward in…

Are all my words lonely, or nearly departed; decapitated; Visible only from the ankles down, nonchalant? I Get bored. All my words are not paying Strict attention to the television. I get dysfunctional. My words, coincidental though they…

The old-timers at the Working Man’s Club wear a sheen of indifference every Wednesday night. Beneath the wafting, cresting mountains of burning cigarettes smoke, the train-track rattle of dominoes chipping at the dark wood tables in the corner, the consta

this orient tide come occident: this roll of wreck and reckoned eyes that fathomless are found or made to find her keep within the tight shut shell in soundings deeper than the plumblined soul these western waves gone east: these…

Marie Poupon-Kennedy wasn’t strangled by one set of hands; there were thirty sets around that long, pale neck.

This is the place you need a third hand

I have constructed this emotion with tinfoil and stilts. I wear the mask of a typewriter. I have roots in Minnesota. I have a glass hat and a junkyard monstrosity pregnant with parables.

Popular wisdom would have it that heroin addicts are some kind of cross between vampire menace and low-rent cartoon.

the colors of the night

Luke and Diane sat at a round white table looking around the room. There were clusters of people forming an archipelago of cordial exchange and small talk. All but a few were strangers, friends and family of his sister-in-law Mary, now a widow, though the word sounded…

Rains came again and wore away at their flesh, revealing bone as white and sharp as sharks’ teeth.

Extrapolate, interpolate/ to add imaginary flesh// to fragmentary bones.

On a cold, dark night near to All Hallows' Eve in October of 1930, I was summoned by Constable John Wakefield to the house of Vernalier Driscoll. The constable was wild-eyed and very nervous, his hair appeared to be standing on end.

Two lovers — their genders / faces / social identities / etc. up to the viewer’s imagination (though I caution you, dear reader, not to imagine yourself in this role due to the psychic intensity of the following passages) — writhe against each other

She looked over from the passenger seat at her husband and smiled. It had been twenty years. She hadn't expected him to remember. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, placed her hand on his thigh.“We'll be home soon enough,” he said. He was not…