Reading Time: < 1 minute here are the birds flying pastin a purple skyoh how they go, they goand here are the fish gatheringupon the shore silentlyshore after shoreand the smaller flying thingswhose names we never knowbright glints in hot breezeall gone now do I lament these too soon?is there a turn in the roadup ahead that I can’t yet Read more
MoreReading Time: 4 minutes I sat cringing at the clinking ice cubes and clanking plates. The sounds seemingly growing louder the longer I sat there. Jennifer sat in front of me at the table for four, but I was looking past her at the wait staff, watching as they scurried throughout the Cracker Barrel, banging together dirty dishes and Read more
MoreReading Time: 2 minutes “Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” – Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” “And four black feet deep with/ Summer’s rotting rooks/ like Thomas Head’s and my time’s/ Unlamented, springless, passed.” – Assia Guttman Wevill, “Winter-End, Hertfordshire” (quoted in Guardian Unlimited. Saturday April 10, 1999) When we first met Read more
MoreReading Time: < 1 minute I could cut off all my hair ragged, nogrow it long in snarls, never wash,go barefoot, become leather,tangle my fingers up with ripped claws in barbed wiremade of rope and snagged lace, oh, yesI have been angry All. My. Life.so angry I have a little stove in hereburning burning low, and Read more
MoreReading Time: < 1 minute S.O.S. Inside we each have two radios the small onejust below the liverthe other where ‘World’s oldest dog Maggie dies peacefully, sleeping in her basket‘ used to be tights lose their atoms to the friction of my thighsI buy new onessame/time OKOKOK the blood on your knees times a numberyour meat roughly equivalent to seventy-eight full chicken breaststhree Maggies Read more
MoreReading Time: 14 minutes Originally published in Word Riot (August 2015) If we had lived in a godless, socialist country like Finland we would have been fine, but here in the land of Family Values our marriage could not survive paying for preschool. We were not like the Patagonias, who toured the school with us in their matching down Read more
MoreReading Time: 10 minutes This is an excerpt from an in-progress, yet sort of stalled, novel that doesn’t really have a good title yet. I smelled like a coprophiliac, except a coprophiliac would have made more efforts at hygiene than I’d done. I had a week’s worth of grime and sweat on me, hadn’t tried to bathe except to Read more
MoreReading Time: < 1 minute Twa Corbies Two crows divergedin a yellow woodwhose flights were trackedby crow the thirdwho watched the horsethat lay quite still. The first two crowsbrought back their brothersbut that third crowhad got the eyesfirst one then twofrom the head of the horsethat lay so still. I’ll sing you howthe gang of crowsdescend on the horsein ones Read more
MoreReading Time: 2 minutes (Taco Bell Quarterly rejected this marvelous little story, so you know their shit is gonna be FIRE! Read this, then read their next issue when it comes out.) Flooded out, car stalled, storm of the decade, I’m on foot and awash. I take shelter in the nearest church which turns out to be a Taco Read more
MoreReading Time: < 1 minute Ominous dial-up noises ensue,ensorcel memory out of its driftwhere it happily had been gatheringspacedust, pocketing the prettier nuggets.But strange persistent noises jarred memoryout of its reverie, it had heard thosesounds once surely but what,what could they be? A sort of buzz and thenin disharmonious pitches, quietly,“bleep blorp bleeeepscree blorp p p ” —ah. Ah yes. Read more
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