You expected to see blood dripping through his clothes —writing prompt from a student so you kept your distanceso you closed your eyesso you ran as fast as you couldthrough that garbage strewn alley,down that street linedwith dilapidated cars.You did not pause to considerthe wound—who or what caused it.You gave him no consideration at all.You were…
At the age of eleven, he composes a short treatise on the sounds of vibrating bodies. Finds it easiest to hear people when they’re asleep: a sound that comes from their dreams. Secretly takes his pulse several times a day in flesh and in vain. Pascal despairs of the husk, delights in the spark, fears…
This audience is dressed in the old clothes and humiliations I in my mask, powder woman, sick of everything, my own failings most of all. Someone I heard jumped into the pit the orchestra, during the third act and landed between harp and horn, mangled like a doll at the bottom of a well. I…
I’ve come a long way to the pulpit today to advance our causes: No more coal-mine canaries. Abolish Susan Jeffries who teases Max Biggins who sits on the seesaw and cries and cries. May she admit she wants to marry him; may the foremen confess that oft in the dark and brute weight of their…
1. The motel over the bridge could be demolished as early as spring, and a dollar store there overlooking the river and what I saw—a woman propped between two men. Her body looked stiffly drunk or drugged the way she was hustled upright with the posture of a fence. Held up by the men, like…
Homo Fictus…is never conceived as a creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Strange, how rarely it’s a topic. Yet how we cherish that dark, soothing lake water beneath our chattery reflexive surfaces. “Already,” a story has it, “she seemed to be fishing in…
a white-trunked white- limbed white-leafed tree white petals sepals white stamens pistils bees inside a white woman pure white body skin hair white eyes white lips nipples blood white grass for the white stones of this white dream
“Is anything—not even happiness but just not torment—possible? No, nothing!” she answered herself now without the least hesitation. “…All efforts have been made; the screw is stripped.” —Anna in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina “She’s writing a book for children and doesn’t tell anybody about it, but she read it to me, and I gave the…
A psychological experiment was once performed on horses. Each animal had been taught to stamp a hoof four times, say, when the trainer called out that number. The horses that got the number right were rewarded with a carrot or cube of sugar. But for experiment’s sake, the trainers periodically denied the horses their rewards…
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