Short Fiction and Poetry

The dictionary animals are fast asleep, as they have been all their lives, as you were told when you were told [...]

The birds fly up, The birds fly down, The birds fly underneath the ground[...] In layers of silt, beneath our feet Their feathers rustle,

Old men puff cigars as crows caw on wire, and rain cleans the roofs, spilling onto tarped stands [...]

A chicken is not a poultice even though I hug one to my chest. She followed me around all Summer pressing lawn under her scratchy toes [...]

i have piled your shriveled shells in the corner of the windowsill. my knees fused together, i let the bedsheet terror consume me. [...]

it’s springtime in the nearctic realm. another season                 among the almácigo ends, as sun shadows contract. [...]           

Canlit wild child Homeboy emeritus Frail and failing when I met him Under Merna’s watchful eye [...]

My old sled hung in Aunt Tiss’s garage like a tattered old towel. On trips North, we’d visit it like a mummy in the Carnegie Museum. [...]

The love of your life Tells you she’s had it; The old shoe will not do. She grown, easily, a size or two, [...]

The pensioned depravity of eyes obsessed by needlepoint loss of hunger for friends grasping worn leather purses [...]

The swallows of Shady Bend carry the ghosts on the wisps of their tails, dragging them to the bridge from the muddy banks of the Saline[..]

oh, but she’s a breezy, cool one today, a tempestuous zephyr running roughshod over early spring reveries of blissful meadows [...]

A plush of cheddar and eggs. As I fork it up, the ghosts of Harvard Square surround me, drawn by the thick aroma. [...]

My daughter calls this morning on her way to buy a bagel, it’s raining she says, grey and spring-raining, and here [...]

Your soul resembles distant horizons. Like burning stars abandoned between dawn and dusk, the evening skies are as heavy as your heart.[...]

While the false teeth chatter in the man’s tired mouth. . . Oh, what a world! the old woman says to no one in particular [...]

He said I caught his eye and wouldn’t let go after the rain that June afternoon. He saw my sparkle and watched me flutter [...]

I’m thinking of a number between one and ten. It gives me something to think about. [...]

in the suburban fields of my archetypal childhood there arose strange shudders of unintended violence [...]

This traitor came from a long             line of zero in, drop the load, circle             around to catch the explosion [...]