Most recent stories

Here I Am

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Here I am in the city where we walked side by side, you had driven a great distance and lost your way somewhere where exits left the highway from both directions and unpredictably.

Yet More Band Names For Sale or Rent

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Random Access Hundred Dollar Bill Burning Question The Black Truffles Open John Queasy Sister Tortoise and the Hair Duck Tail and the Wrap Stiff Resistance Knee Jerk Reaction Tough Cookie Bar Code and the Illusion Erosion Eroti

Bitter Bits

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Entropy/ has my number.

Banging My Head Against the Garage Door of Religion

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The villagers smash in a garage door with their heads, causing some to bleed from the ears and mouth.

it snows

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I popped open the wine with a Nike shoelace, a trick I learned on the internet

Puddles

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The first inkling that I might be in love with Josie came at our high school senior day outing at, oh, what's its name, state park. I forgot, but it doesn't matter. She smiled, did a little wave and stepped away from her friends, lifted her sundress a little to keep it dry,…

Assiduity Nineteen

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Luv walks around touching everything with her little hands. Uzma follows behind her, talking sweetly, saying: "This is going to be your new home for a while, darling."

It is Written

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That Dagwood is not a real person but a story told in dots. That Blondie is a male fantasy and will one day find her Nora Helmer.

The Incident

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There are some I don’t recognize. My gaze lingers for a second. It’s bad business this.

Dancing on the Rhythm Bus–One Night after Leaving The Pyramid Club, 1991

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The next day I can’t recall at all, a waste, like the flash of twenty years of my life, faces that pass you like comets in some erogenous unnamed zone of night, but they got me in some isolation room with my wrists in leather restraints.

#26 Relation>Relation (A Poem)

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Something like: Answers to questions you might not yet have? [Answers we will try hard not to provide]

The First Day of Summer

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It is the first day of summer, a blue-green afternoon, and we sit beneath the English oak, Quercus robur. Everything has at least two names. It is the first day of summer, or the last day of something else.

Why I Gave Up on Math and Began My Big Fat Writing Career

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I’d met this crowd of drunken poets from San Francisco Even though this was smack dab in the middle of winter Smack dab in the middle of the flattened Illinois plains Why they all left San Francisco I’ll never completely understand But there we we

Mural, Mosaic, and Satori

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He thought of natural violence that had to do with the wind and the Atlantic Ocean. He thought of the Gulf Stream, that important title, that someone had shown him on a map and explained about in detail.

My Cousin & I

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My cousin and I walked around the village at night. It was beginning to rain, but we walked on. She had a jacket. I didn’t because of course. She said: “Sometimes I just want to know if he’s settling or he’s really in love with me.”

Reynee Deys and Reynee Nehyts and little dogs called Feydeaux.

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As I understand it, he crafted his art from sweat and blood; on parchment of living scrotum stretched over fretful porpentines; using a fresh dodo quill for each new preposition, and all that only on the first wet day after solstice in Yobhel. Something l

Art Survives

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Forget the salt erasure of Carthage,/ all the Meso-American artifacts/ smelted to float the Armada

Snow Angels (after Sandy Hook)

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The weatherman can't predict accumulation. He can only tell you it will be cold. Expect ice, wind, snow, expect delays. Your daughters play outside, dancing around the Evergreen, its branches bearing the weight of snow, its branches

The new year begins

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martyred young women lie in hospital beds

Family

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For instance, my sister's husband. If I say brown socks, yellow boxer shorts, fishnet undershirt. If I say plastic bag and two tepid beers. And a voice that glides to falsetto when he: you're a tad too obscene for my taste, Julia, while he tries to light the filter end of…

Secret Life of Storms

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Someday, the Grim Reaper, wrapped in hooded cowl, the thorny stem of a red rose clenched between his teeth, will climb up the garden trellis to my bedroom window

This is Not an Indie Movie

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This is not an indie movie about love and happiness and Al Green songs redone by actresses pretending to be songwriters.

ALL THE BASTARDS AND ME

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The apartment was a second-level place, so I went down the steps and looked through the stained glass window of the door. “Ah hell,” I said to myself. Raymond Carver and John Fante and Charles Bukowski were outside. I opened the door.

Fire In The Heart

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The woman leapt from the top of the burning building. The flames reddened the faces of the watching crowd. The heat pushed them back. The woman hit the ground. The crowd oooooed. If only I'd been a firewoman, I thought, with a ladder as tall as a building and a…

The crack

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I put my mouth to it and said hello hello hello.

Outré Souls (WIP)

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When the lore of the land could no longer hold the minds of men, they turned their eyes to places where they expected to find no other gaze.

Light, Now

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It's 100 degrees in your tower/and that braid you're so proud of/is one hot ladder to nowhere.

Touchstone Excerpt 3. (edit)

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She glanced up at his face and read the contempt in his features on the instant, but the page before her offered no such insight. Nothing.

The Winston Peacock Transpiration

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Winston Peacock had had a long day that New Year’s Eve of the final full year of his old life. There had been contemplation about the grave failures, the money lost. The third quarter of this past fiscal year had been especially dismal.

Joseph Campbell by the Aloe Vera Plants

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There was man from antiquity that sat next to me. His belief in the healing qualities of Aloe Vera so pronounced, that the house brimmed with such. He had no use for modernity in any of its forms but was fond of supermarkets. When in one he was overwhelmed with an…