Stories by Chris Okum
Chris Okum's Favorites
- I’ll Book That Therapy Appointment Soon
- Just So
- Dancing with the protocols of chance
- Staying
- 77 Words About Last Night
- Walt's Frozen Head
- At a loss
- grocery list
- Confession
- Cool Gray Redemption
- Happiness
- Frozen Chicken
- The Problem with Pretty Girls
- I Saw God in a Wheelchair
- On Writing about Velveeta
- University of X
- The Murder of Crows
- The First Soliloquy of the Interior Zombie
- Biggus Bangus
- Banana Creme Pies for Sixty Percents
- No More Dogs
- Cuss
- You Wear Camo?
- funereal boredom
- Conch Shell
- وكان فريق البيتلز جدا جدا جدا جيد جدا
- Uncle Remus is Not Racist
- Rewind
- Milkshake And Fries
- The Modern Man
- Sickness
- untitled
- Dealing with Sudden Melancholy
- A Kohlhaas international lass of stupidity at your service humanity!
- The scientific structures and their material implications of post-cosmological existentialism, or nihilism goes on to an existen
- The Loss of a Stitch
- When I Was Young In the Suburbs
- Horowitch and Twaddle
- Executive sweet
- Solution
- My Grandmother's Wedding Ring
- Cavity
- 12.22.12
- A Definitive Saga Falls Upon Deaf Ears
- The not so great Popsicle caper
- Dogs
- Tradition and the Individual Talent
- In Swag We Trust
- Black Eyes, Blue Tears, and Dark Thoughts
- Erase Her
- Manhattan
- The seasons, it is said...
- They Didn't Make It Ghazal
- The Gruden
- Dog Medicine
- 1,400 Degrees
- Trailblazer Meets His Match [Card #20: Judgment]
- What Remains
- Contained
- Ted Nugent Style-Wild, Part 2: So Much for the After Glow; Regression Towards the Mean is the National Standard
- My Father Teaches Me To Drink Straight Shots
- 13 fragments of a somniloquy, overheard by a burglar lost in the basement complex on midsummer night
- Empty or Too Full?
- Adventures at an orgy
- The Waves
- Time and the Toolbox
- Some Day Mars! or Bee Thankful
- Crazy Later
- Exes of All Sorts: A Punk Rock (and Stems of Punk Rock) Compilation
- How to MC Your Niece's Wedding In Front Of A Four-Poster Bed On A Raft When All The Guests Have Given Names That Start With Z
- Becoming an Author
- Congratulations On Your New Diagnosis! (Greeting Cards for People With Mental Problems)
- Almonds
- Manfred Mann
- At the Number Party
- (or she)
- A Dozen Rehab Knock Knock Jokes
- The Watchers
- Georgia on my mind...
- TO MYSELF
- Exasperation Management
- Two Different Worlds
- You Have Big, Gaping Holes in Your Life . . . But You're Trying to Work, Anyway [#5 of 10]
- THE WEDDING
- The King's Largesse
- Bread
- Brother
- 66 W
- Lamenting Lexiconical Loss
- My VaJayJay, The Homing Pigeon
- A Fracas in the Memory Palace
- Bird
- Hard Ass Ghazal
- Islander
- A Bum and His Shopping Cart, Giving Up His Ways
- COSMOGONY
- Lines Written in a Honda Civic
- You Have Big, Gaping Holes in Your Life . . . But You're Trying to Work, Anyway [#8 of 10]
- Murder in the Fookin Bushes: A Tony Blair Mystery
- Skype's Not for Losers. Really.
- Coast to Coast
- The Big Door Prize
- HOW TO TELL PEOPLE WE SHOULD EVACUATE THE PLANET BECAUSE, APPARENTLY, YOU'VE BEEN INSANE ALL ALONG by Stephen Hawking
- flash poem
- Samosely
- 'MINESWEEPER': MY REASON FOR LIVING by Office Guy
- This is our final rejection of your submissions.
- Voice of the Century
- Wired
- SHARPEI! by Tao™ Lin®
- Small Budget Poems
- Liz@Phil
- Running in the Rain
- Obligations
- Sit Down, Here.
- Excerpt from 'Leanna Writes to Emma Forrest'
- The End of My Second Life
- Milford the Tabby Cat
- Cheerful but Awful
- The Abduction
- SKELETON SEX
- Perfect Victim
- A Well-Behaved Skeptic
- Mitch
- A Triple Moan of Descending Pitch
- Pretending Veracity, History Winks
- Wednesdays They Pay Us, But Now It's Thursday
- Seventh Floor Ward
- Perdition
- A grocery list found in a pocket at the end of another story
- October’s 13
- Bands, Again?
- Books and Mysterious Experiences
- Parts
- Staving-Off Active Inertia [Card #6: The Lovers (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.6)]
- Brown Paper Bag.
- Biograph 2
- Staving-Off Active Inertia [Card #6: The Lovers (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.7)]
- Security Notes to the Museum of Winter
- Biograph 3
- An Interview With Pere Ubu
- Don't Leave Me Alone!
- Swoon
- Faces of Death Revisited
- The Twentieth Floor
- Prisoners (edited)
- What the Dark Matter Says
- If The Fire Is Not In Your Apartment
- When Words Won't Wait
- Memoir 2.1
- Biograph 5
- Apollinaire's Trepanned Skull
- In a Quiet Place
- Arrival
- Incompetent Translation: Le Bateau ivre
- Doin' Double-Time for Dead Weight [Card #3: The Empress (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.1)]
- Modulus of Elasticity
- 20 Things I Learned about Norman Rockwell from "American Mirror, The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell"
- MC of the SS
- TWO STEPS
- Regarding Bill Yarrow’s Assertion that Herrick Was a Voyeur (Poor Julia: Violated, but Immortal)
- Luck
- Floating Away
- Charlemagne
- The Midnight Stars of Flashback Recollection
- Jorge Curioso Flies a Plane
- Dick Cheney Confessionals
- Prime cut
- The Beatle Suite:7 Beatle Inspired Poems
- Teenage Wasteland
- Seed Toss
- Dirt
- Grace for Mao
- Tell Me, Kind Sir
- Take Your Gun to Work Day
- Phantom Limb
- Plan B
- Cup of Trembling
- holding it down
- Notes for a Life. In a Swing. No Wind to Speak of.
- How to Have a Fulfilling Sexual Relationship with Your Own Parents (Part One)
- "Take twenty. Smoke 'em if y'got'em."
- my first racist joke
- Loose
- The Tide
- Cryptsville USA
- Heart of Hearts
- There Is Still Some Old Magic Bean Dip
- Out of the Loop
- 1970
- Chalk (Sunflowers) on a Sidewalk
- Funhouse
- The Birds
- April, 1956
- The balloon of you
- Will Someone Please Put Dan Savage, Camille Paglia, Quentin Tarantino, and Marshall Mathers on an Island, Away from Us?
- Being Old is No Place for Sissies
- Death by Subtext (revised)
- A Manual for Readers
- Down on the Street
- Who Will Wed This Woman?
- LA Blues
- Car Alarm
- The Nudist Camp at the End of the Rainbow
- Ten Little Indians
- BUTT MEAT
- Your Tits Make My Feathers Fall Off
- Phenomenology as Snapshots
- 50
- The Gypsies
- For the young couple in the stairwell passed on my way to teaching Medieval World Literature
- Ms. Pac-Man, on Posing Nude for Playboy™
- Modern Teleology
- The Tiger I Shot
- The Mirror Tires of Looking at Itself
- Mercurius' Hipster [Card #1: The Magician (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.1)]
- you're a james now. here's what to expect:
- Who Loves the Sun?
- Brace
- The Model
- Right of Spring
- once upon a time in Sumeria
- After Drinking At McSorley’s
- Return Trip
- Relic
- some precursors of Mantegna
- To Do Reminders
- A Satisfied Customer
- Nightmare
- Space
- Drive-by Neighborhood Fiction Flash
- Make Music, Not Love
- A Night Ride With the Conservative Poetry Enforcers
- The 14
- Help Support My Attempt at Being Funny
- Long Sticks Are Often Useful
- A Whole Forest Full of Leaves
- In the Stream of Space Expanding, Eddies
- First Shot (36)
- Crystal-Blue Persuasion [Card #2: The High Priestess (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.3)]
- Pretty Face
- Vigil and Prayer
- The Innocence of Age
- Lips of an Angel
- How To Break A Toe In One Easy Step
- 19.
- Unknowns
- Life as a Porno
- Moments of Movement
- Drought
- Note To Self
- If "1984" Had A More Upbeat Ending.....
- Old Vibrations
- Awaiting What the Afternoon May Bring
- Brief Studies of Doomed Females
- Moving On
- Something Horrible Has Happened
- 1957: Kathleen Eulalie, Widow
- Europe
- Polite Grafitti
- Ten Books That Have Stuck with Me Off the Top of My Head as I Make Them Up, #2
- Angels in the Margins
- Decided
- John Ruskin doing a Swan Dive
- take
- Human Kind Can’t Bear Very Much Reality
- Honey
- Father Dunne's School for Wayward Boys #4
- Safe
- Funny Jokes
- Ronald Reagan Loves Astrology.
- Pox Americana [Card #4: The Emperor (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.5)]
- Source Code
- First Shot (57)
- The Shop Girl
- The First Heart Attack, or What Happens to Your Daughter When You Die for a Little While
- Rwanda Suite: Slim
- Dilemma
- Head Over Feet.
- I've Got a Secret
- Bus Ride Through SF
- Hank and Nettie
- Dog Days
- The Light After Equinox
- Protein Transfer
- Damned Writers
- Apartments
- Déjà Vu Sur l’Herbe
- Three Micros
- Stranger than Paralyzed [Card #10: The Wheel of Fortune (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.4)]
- The Blue of Milk
- How the Body Prepares Itself
- Bacon's Blood (3)
- Then, But Not Now
- Philip Guston Painting of the Courtroom
- When Birds Do Not Fly
- Teleprompts
- 3 short poems
- The Story of the Wendigo
- Two Little Fictions
- Lip
- Stupidest. Film Director. EVER!
- Love Tracer
- Oblique in an Acute New Century
- Ineluctable
- G.
- Office Visit
- Sausages
- Night Moves
- Z Machine
- U R Doomed
- Elevator to the Angels
- The Mayor
- Sleep Soak
- Pandermonium [Card #15: The Devil (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.1)]
- Ballerina
- War Stories...
- Pandermonium [Card #15: The Devil (WORK-IN-PROGRESS — v.2)]
- Very Short Stories And Pictures Of Ducks
- Bacon's Blood (18)
- Dumb Luck and the Fall of Empires
- Glad the Moon Worked the Night Shift
- Little Tech Puppies In the Artisan Beer Hall
- Pharaoh
- Vitamin D
- Three Stanzas Ending with a Line from R. Crumb
- Crumbling Stones Crush Our Self Esteem
- [Noon. A, b, C & D.]
- Republican Presidential Candidates Haiku
- Bacon's Blood [24]
- The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 8
- Baby Carrot
- The bridge
- Remedy
- Just Stopped In For A Raspberry Slushie
- Handy in a Denny's Parking Lot
- Note from the wilderness
- It's the New Age of Bullshit
- Kimchi Hatchet
- He Brings Things Closer
- chicken coup
- Honey & Darling
- Not Good Enough
- Of Roses and Hyacinths
- Suicide Consulting Hotline
- Peterson Park
- 77 Words About Saturday
- Poem for the Poet
- The Kept Man
- A Sometimes Niggling Notion
- Wallflower
- Granny's Reform School Weekend Intensive Workshop, Session One
- Swim for It! [Card #18: The Moon (v.1)]
- Fear in a Handful of Dust / National Poetry Month 2015 30 Poems
- Saga of the Sugar Ants
- After Watching Zardoz
- Bacon's Blood (32)
- American Triptych
- Uninscribed Tablet
- LUPUS
- Reversal
- I Did Not Write This
- The Flintstone Variations
- Optical Delusion
- Help Me Rhonda
- Curse at Your Smoking Gun
- When you were nine
- Ancestry.comedy
- Pretty as a Pictogram [Card #17: The Star]
- My Relationship With Reading
- The Road
- In Tongues
- Ennui of Wings
- The secret meaning of celebrity
- Span
- No Alternative
- Our Story in Ten Photographs
- Postcard from the Asylum of the Nameless
- The Cosmos as Gerunds
- Making Conversation in a Bar Making Soap Into a Bar
- Vain Boasts and Confessions in Descending Mode
- Chinese Whispers (or Telephone)
- Begettings
- A Red We Hope Is Not Of Earth
- Mother Died Tomorrow
- 3 Kids
- Berlin Terror
- Shadow Self, Schmadow Self [Card #5: The Pope (v.2)]
- Fun Times at the Memorial Park
- All Of These Eyes.....
- Bacon's Blood (47)
- Reds and Blues
- Inspiration at the Edge
- Bacon's Blood (49)
- Love Song Number 277
- One Man Caught in a Multitude of Self
- a face made of glass
- October
- Glen Beck: Limp-Dick Detective [Ch. 4]
- Scene One
- Chocolate Diamonds
- A Language in Decay or the Progress of a New World Vernacular
- The Dead in Paris, Complete
- Fucking Origami
- That One Time We Were on NPR...
- Naming the Beauties
- One Dead in Violent Crash
- Relative
- a poem by Darryl Price restructured by Samuel Derrick Rosen
- Central Washington State On Five Dollars A Day
- Rain (a sense of her)
- Confetti Bomb
- The Seagulls of Sauchiehall Street
- From the discovery of fire to a crypt slash restaurant
- One Finger
- To The Audience Members Who Chatted During The Recording Of Bill Evans Trio Live At The Village Vanguard, June 25, 1961
- There is no such thing as stillness
- Something Else
- You are not Medusa
- Sinking in Half-empty Glasses
- wild gesticulations below a jasmine moon
- The Mythology of Rooms
- ...love is just a sundog...
- Snatch (XIV)
- City Chambers Masquerade
- The technological Judas delivers no kiss
- Something's Wrong
- What I took to be God
- Do not speak of love or death
- Suddenly Jonathan Franzen
- Stockholm Syndrome in Glasgow
- Because
- Death's Honesty (Ch-2)
- Suicide Machines
- Mindspeak
- Where is Vincent Price when you need him?
- The Laughing Buddha is Stuck Inside a Time Capsule
- Seven Haiku for Sad and Scary Times
- Danger Above, Danger Below
- Seven Things I Learned About David Letterman from Jason Zinoman's "Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night."
- Love?
- Snarket
- the ethics of graffiti
- I Took Part in 5 Orgies, Which I Liked, and Got Pounded into Shit
- Honoring Heritage
- The Karaoke Girls
- Face to Face
- Lucky Strike
- Because...
- Regarding Viet Nam
- Neediness, Incarnate
- She's Up a Level
- Starry Night
- 'MY DICK IS SO HARD FOR JESUS!' by Christofascist Jones
- 15 Minutes of Sordid Fame, Stretched to Infinity: Introducing My Net Stalker, Uri Tenpo (creative non-fiction)
- far beyond
- Hard Times
- An Interlude of Stephen Miller Thought
- George Martian (psych eval)
- Sorting It All Out
- Voices of the Dying
- Not Making Heads or Tales
Chris, thanks for your fave on my piece, Central Washington State On Five Dollars A Day. I loved Interrupted Conversation, and look forward to seeing more of your work. Cheers, Ray
Chris - Thanks for Ballerina. It's true I'm not around much, but I believe this is the first time I've ever seen you use a word like "lovely."
Hi Chris. You need a note on your wall so here it is.
Big fun at Fictionaut!