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  • from Mischief Night

    ". . . as good an explanation as any for the panic is that all the intelligent people were listening to Charlie McCarthy." – A "prominent social scientist" quoted by Hadley Cantrill in The Invasion from Mars Accounts of this kind often begin by giving you the line on some immediate menace. The geeks are…

  • Retrospect In The Kitchen

    After the funeral I pick forty pounds of plums from your tree Earth Wizard, Limb Lopper and carry them by DC 10 three thousand miles to my kitchen and stand at midnight — nine o’clock your time — on the fourth day of your death putting some ravelled things unsaid between us into the boiling…

  • Evening In Omaha

    How close the world feels at this hour: you could almost touch it, leave the cold house as the light slips from the furniture and touch it. On Dodge lovers sit stalled in traffic, thigh grazing thigh so casually only a stranger might notice how their limbs tense and relax, the goose-flesh blooming above her…

  • Flute Song

    Earth-spirit, wood-spirit, stone, father, Other, exposed root I said goodbye to by the river, where are you now? I fondle a glass eye. The eye reflects leaves, stars, galaxies. . . . Space was always my demon, the unreachable. From a black hole a wavering flute song, readable.

  • These Foolish Things

    Bitter words whispered in a railroad station. A hair caught in a wallet’s web. Then: stroll the streets the way the poets did or some novel character musing after night’s revels, clutching a glove, a bit of silk, a talisman of disillusion. On Rue Huchette a gypsy breathes fire for spare change. Acrid whips of…

  • A Compassionate Leave

    Nothing ever seemed to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but never doing especially well,…

  • Cry For Comfort

    The moon clouds over and is done. The Polish crones roam Mutual Tower spitting, polishing, sifting the trash for small gifts their grandchildren will turn into trash. Deep in the folds of the dark, some poor infant cries and cries for comfort and will not be calmed. Under the police siren’s wail it continues, clearing…