Most recent stories

Feeling Marlene (from OPEN CITY Magazine Number 16)

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I got your card in the mail via my ex-wife in Saskatoon. On it you wonder where I am, if I am still writing, and if I have any stories I would send for you to look at because you think I should be published, too.

Death by Dinner

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I can't believe it's Frankie, but there he is at a table on the far side, just in front of the big picture window. I hold the menu close to my face and peek again over the top, watching as he reaches under the white linen tablecloth to plant…

Rome Ants In The Sky

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~!~

Trail, Pool, Snake

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Early on, I looked for work; I walked the want-ad trail. Shuttle-driver, apartment leasing expert, laundry technician, account executive, PHP developer, dog sitter, sleep study subject – I would do anything that seemed steady.

Dead Man Sleeping

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Joyce Addleberg hated sleeping alone, so when her husband died in his sleep one night, it was only natural that she kept him around.

Diary of a Bolshoi Potato Dancer

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“Is that an erect annual plant in your codpiece, Mr. Flax, or are you just glad to see me?”

Polaroids at the Old Place

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Can I still be in your pictures?

The Goldsmith's Anniversary

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He searched for something deserving of the word “bestowed,” something so rare as to horrify the clerics of ordinariness.

Chapter Two: Oracle

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The first thing I saw was a sandal, but it didn't exactly look priestly. It was golden and glowing, and the foot it was strapped to had red painted nails. The straps wrapped around her ankles, and up her slender leg, tied off in a bow below the knee.

The Silken(revised version)

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tentacles of stringy rains opens up the stage antics for this common February day to the fidgety audience at hand but it appears that they just won't be able to grab on, not this time. The familiar grumpy wind with…

History Channel

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Some of the notes allude to how the ineluctable modalities of the visible and audible are transformed by the experience of hanging in a transparent egg half out of a B-17 at 10 thousand feet waiting to be spattered like paint.

Dialysis

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On the days I wasn’t there, my insides felt like paper-mâché.

Zapruder Film

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But there it was, amid the “junk” set to be thrown out with the rest of his childhood, opened accidentally to the page of his Indiana Jones Action Journal about his winter formal when he was sixteen.

Blues Machine

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Rockin' Joe Heath stumbled into the stairwell in nothing but a black Zildjian t-shirt, shushing himself, trying to see right, pounding head. He recalled the old lily pattern of the wall­paper and something about the tattered edges…

Facsimile in Boots

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There she is. A paper doll of me. The dress, the lilt, the self-hatred. The crowd thins and swells in want of a scene. Conversations begin, pretend, then halt. My gin and tonic sweats into my hand and I lick at the…

At the Juvenile Bubonic Plague Telethon

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We’re not like a lot of your fly-by-night disease-based charities. Every pence we raise goes directly to St. Bartholomew’s, where 90% of it ends up in the pockets of doctors so they can buy expensive horses.

The Arrival

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On a certain level, everyone was relieved when it finally did happen. They had been waiting a long time for it. Finally, they could relax. There was no reason for anxiety anymore.

The Here Here Here Lately

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electron metastasis

SHADOW

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I am a shadow. Cooler than liquid. I don't need a container to take shape.

Metaviews at Metazen

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This is self-reflection or self-reflexive writing. Candor but not verse. That is what I write: not-verse. On occasion I write a poem though rarely an occasional poem. Instead of calling it non-fiction we could call it non-verse.

The Busy World is Perfectly Happy

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to continue to crumble its way through another grinding cycle of slowly walking to the edge of the universe ancient treelike beings, like gentle ghost buffalo, and our own thundering buildings by the hundreds of thousands, …

Outside Thunder Pallets

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Carl’s peculiarity of toilet paper rolls is not covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act – he’s looked it up.

Mountains

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Sweet Sounds of Home

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Father makes sure the rum is safe, and still down, on his ass, he unscrews the top and takes a slug, and then a second one.

Moving Out

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Lying in the blissful glow of young television. Idly sleeping, eyes open and ears closed.

Drum Naked

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Where truth is revealed To all, transparency In policy, including The REAL reasons We are at war.

My Grandmother Becomes A Young Widow

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I want her life to pass in a world without meridian

Standing aloof

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I think it cumbersome to walk within a darkened room. Too awkwardly uncouth, for one with such a corpulent frame, to hug the hungry. It weighs one down, to wave airily, to wildlings By cages, and pain, made tame. Best to look away, than…

The Trapper Boy at Work, One Mile Underground

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The coal carts come and go like the seasons, never stopping.

Another Land

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In another land...