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  • The Shy

    We even breathed shyly, all the while envying everybody their courage & finesse. But either our nerve gave out, or we were much too patient, always over-rehearsed, like those old men, the frowners who spend hours fly casting in the park, practicing, each flick of their wrists erasing the memory of streams and flame-spotted trout….

  • A Dry Wake for Ex

    Mummified by gauzy July heat, my escape into the library’s neutral cool brings me to the dog-eared, thumbed-through news: “His failure was his greatest success,” says “Milestones” in Time magazine: “Died—Frederick Exley.” And then this prick of a hurt born of the aforementioned fact, and I feel it: Brain- muddled, maybe, but still functional—pulse flushes…

  • Jet

    Sometimes I wish that I was still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids…

  • Who Owes Us

    No one owes us anything. We claim it’s mother and father. How can you live in this place? The floors are so dirty and it stinks. I sit waiting for the mailman. There’s a package he’s bringing. Why isn’t he here yet? The worm is alive. The apple tree, the coyote, the walnut, the beggar,…

  • The Oysters

    Pat Boone-not the Pat Boone but only a graduate student in Agricultural Science-was driving the oysters down to Mulberry to have them irradiated. He was used to being the wrong Pat Boone but was nevertheless miserable, careening down Interstate 75 in the windless predawn, gripping the wheel of the Food Science van with his troubled…

  • Self-Improvement

    Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents’ summer home, Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice: use nothing but his tongue tip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until…

  • Glory

    The autumn aster, those lavender ones, and the dark-blooming sedum are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth with the remote intensity of a dream. These things take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see, everything I can think of. I want ordinary…

  • Foucault in Vermont

    No author for this fall landscape, nor signs Of limits tested, except the fence just yards From I-89, and a stray Holstein Unfazed by traffic heading for the border. How different from your time in California, Those LSD trips at Zabriskie Point, Warm nights spent cruising, or in Castro’s bars With studded whips and chains,…