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  • False Confessions

    The author of this story had other plans for me. In his, alas, typical ignorance and ineptitude, he decided to use me (one more time!) as the heavy, a really bad guy in a bleak and downbeat story that most likely would gross you out or, in any case, would sure enough give you the…

  • Happy Birthday

    Go ahead. Open it. I think you’ll like it. I made that wrapping paper myself. It’s similar to rubber, but not exactly. You kind of have to peel it off. Do you like the avocado color? I bet you’ve never seen wrapping paper that thick, huh? Oh, I forgot to tell you-if you touch it…

  • Puritan Impulse

    I talk the least of what I covet most, seldom look at what I wish to see, turn my nose away from what smells best, refuse to listen to my favorite opera, La Traviata, even when it’s sung in town for free. The Van Gogh show can’t make me walk the block to view it,…

  • Orchard Bees

    Wrung-out, aching, caked with a sweat he wouldn’t claim, living the wrong life, he shook the branch until the last apple fell, never glancing at the others, whose backs, as they gathered, were as arched and gravity-clutched as his, their gestures in the limbs as solemn, as exhausted of flight. Bees drifted where he labored:…

  • White Fang

    Hello, readereaper. It’s certainly been a while. May I take your coat? It is four a.m. and my parents and sister are gone to North Carolina for two weeks’ vacation, which means I have the house to myself. So: I come out of the bathroom and the cat is sitting on top of the humidifier…

  • Self-Portrait

    Only the colorless eye is undistracted: a lake Rubbed blue by twilight is not blue to the eye cast blue And a violet sunset cannot be refracted Violet through the violet eye. A crimson retina Won’t conceive the paint of a rigging blooded by dusk Or the stain a star makes, cutting its patina Crimson…

  • Sin

    The tree bore the efflorescence of October apples like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. The wind blew in cold sweet gusts, and the burning taste of fresh snow came with the gradual dark down through the goldenrod. The blue and scarlet sky was gently losing its color, as if from…

  • Sickle

    Sharper than the scythe, which, like the ladder and the boards I couldn’t lift, was long. And quicker, since it was smaller, and, swung in an arc, would sing. I was the age of Latin in school, mollis for mullein, the flannel of whose leaf girls would rouge their Quaker cheeks with, for whom vanity,…

  • The State I Loved You In

    A low sound in the hollows fills low places, fills hollows, carves a hollow from the right place or hollows being in place, a sound I heard in a strange place, in a strange state, just off the road in southern Utah, just over the border, just off the desert, where a field of wheat…