Little Bertha Venation would have been the most exquisite young woman of her century, were it not for her distressing tendancy to cheat on her lovers with other men, for a yes, for a no, sometimes not even for a yes or a no. At the time this story begins, her lover was a splendid…
for Martha A young woman rows to the middle of the river, and plays the violin her father gave her just before he died. She keeps time with her foot, making a wonderful noise on the bottom of the boat, like tapping on a rainbarrel, or a whale’s heartbeat. She plays until almost night. As…
For six days I’ve been re-heating soup. The bird in the soup never flew, never complained unless you would call the red flesh of his head a complaint. I ask my son where we come from. He says the wind. When he couldn’t fly he told me little people helped him pour darkness into holes….
Tiresomely, in prose, long ago great-sonneting Berryman said that in Heart of Darkness the Congo stood for a private part, specifically a vagina, to Marlow. Now, I find that perverse, if I had to say. The continent was mysterious, the river led into its mystery, ok. But Marlow (and Conrad before him) could tell a…
I can remember writing Lie Down in Darkness in total belief, at the age of 23 to 26, that somehow. . .I was contributing my share to the human race – but in such organ-like tones. There was great music droning through my mind as I wrote it, and I think it's a pretty good…
The pleasure in being tired after sex is the feeling of that slow infection someplace else. The explosion passes like the name of a town you leave your body outside of. Emptiness returns to normal under you. Then you burn imaginary rubber, extracting the acrid smell of Indianapolis, the collision of smiles and steel. You…
I love to watch the butcher wipe the sharp blade on his apron stained with fresh blood. I’m going to marry him WHAM the side of beef split open he tenderly spreads it like a woman’s legs between smeared fingers stroking the cold smoothness from his fingertips bloody red drops on the floor spotting…
We sat hunchbacked in the town cafe, elbows propped on grainy wood tables over our coffee. Listening to the recent news a story bloomed of a ghost seen at Badger Swamp. A local made us a map and talked of crops and weather. Seeing myself it was inevitable I had no money, my friend reached…
It’s all because the round man with the pumpkin neck was teaching no one in particular macadam composition, and because a lady giggled like dry fire when the bartender who liked lighting his lighter and looking at it said a fellow wanted to be a vampire to get the inside story but he had bad…
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