Most recent stories

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…

New Year

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It was New Year's Day. My cousin and I were having coffee. It was about ten at night. We were outside the establishment. She said: "Sometimes I think you're not happy. I see it in you."

The Russian on the Train

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I’m not sure if it was the fishnet stockings. Or the pouty red lipstick. Or the tight black leather skirt. Or the mountainous breasts

Tradition and the Individual Talent

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Wee-wee-sweet-pea me? I live, I weep, a third of me passed in sleep, start a scene or two, play and dance the fool, …

Song

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I felt I should write a song To tell you what you meant to me Something I needed to find inside That surprised even me I was blinded by myself And couldn’t see that well What did I do to deserve you? I never knew I’d been through h

Pura Vida

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The girl lifts my head, and I sit up straight once again. She hands me a pair of old work gloves, helps put them on my swollen hands. She wipes my face with a wet, warm towel. Her thin arms tremble. She cries. I cry.

Poem for January 1st, Feast of Christ's Circumcision

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Who has the child’s foreskin The mohel has removed? Who took the bleeding piece of flesh His human nature proved?

Numismatics

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The next/ may be the lucky one,/ undiscovered all these years.

Best Before....

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There is a great deal of hard-edge painted on eyeliner gadding about. Often it is teamed with platinum blonde hair that is edging toward the purple-grey discount home bleaching kit shades, and single-hair width eyebrows, but once it was THE look and we kn

Or Do You Love It?

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published in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review.

Assiduity Eighteen

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A convoy of military vehicles is heading into the city as we are heading out.

A New York Moment

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Harvey C. Hamby was drunk. Usually he held his liquor well, but tonight he was off his form. Stumbling over an ottoman, he landed on the floor in a sodden sprawl. As he fell, his left foot shot out behind him and socked Glenda Steinberg in…

Touchstone: Excerpt 2.

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The only promotion I can do. Excerpts from the most recent book.

Writer Conversation with Husband

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"What, you only like my funny stories?"

That Spark

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these fleeting moments of insanity.

The girl laughing in the dictionary.

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Trigger Warning.

BOXES

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Lama’s mother is dead. She died when Lama was just outgrowing her ballet tutus. When Lama talks about it, it is with the air of one who picks honeysuckle over jasmine. It gives sunshine, she says, to graves. Our epitaphs are so mechanical otherwise. Un

The Tour(ette's) Guide

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There is a woman in here- I am never alone- but she is fully clothed in Detroit Derby Dolls gear and stands at a modest seven inches tall.

Ophelia

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Her ghost/kept coming back/to Hamlet

Next Time, Academics

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I suggested when we passed the flesh shack that we turn around and that I go in and say to the sex workers that the Russians are fetching $3.5K per hour in Manhattan and it's private, unlike there at that road-side shack.