1978

 

perceptible absence.

 There are no seagulls in the desert. 

from 2 Poems, 12/5/24.

  Sober Alcoholic

The enemy of my enemy lives on honeysuckle nectar and never blinks.

I took the enemy of my enemy to the creek to watch her leech sunlight from poison ivy.

The enemy of my enemy looks like she isn’t even breathing sometimes. Is she breathing?

The grass grows between the enemy of my enemy’s clenched fists, but she still won’t move.

Hell exists because the enemy of my enemy believed it into being. Heaven is her daydream.

If the enemy of my enemy could speak, she wouldn’t.

The enemy of my enemy tosses pearls into a bonfire.

When she runs out, she’ll use her own eyes.

Kimberly Wolf

Cuts.

 

from Shadows on the Rock

Its history will shine with bright incidents, slight, perhaps, but precious, as in life itself, where the great matters are often as worthless as astronomical distances, and the trifles dear as the heart's blood.

—

The sailors, though they might indulge in godless behaviour, were pious in their own way; went to confession soon after they got into port, and attended mass. They lived too near the next world not to wish to stand well with it.

Willa Cather

from the Submission Guidelines at Storm Cellar

Traditional: 1. not experimental; 2. ignorance, thanatos, octopodes, standing stones, sex work, MRIs, cavaliers, Cadillacs, rude boys, buried toys, gold fever, war fever, bone fever, baby fever, submarines, pipe dreams, body horror, paycheck horror, sign vs. signifier, black on black tattoos, "for sale: condoms, never used," cigarettes & punk music, smugglers, prairie fire, dice sharps, kissing cousins, "here there be monsters," grown folks business, border crossing, Amazons, apocalyptics, analytics, riding tigers, tiny islands, embezzlement, graffiti, hackers, holograms, huitlacoche, hot zones, outer space….

from an interview in The New Yorker, 6/30/24

I do not “turn to” other writers or stories in the way you suggest. I read a great deal—short stories as well as everything else. For myself, I personally find the short story to be the finest expression of serious writing. Many would argue that poetry claims that place, and for them it does. For me, the entangling strands that make up a coherent short story take skill to construct and skill to read. As for a list of writers and/or stories that I appreciate and admire, I do not have the hours—days—to make such a list. I read for pleasure as well as instruction—if that is what you are getting at.

Annie Proulx

The Good Gods!

Alex Dimitrov

Sartre

 It's strange. I felt less lonely when I didn't know you.

from The Dilemma of Being Human — Glen Martin Taylor

 

An interpretation of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, currently showing at the Arc Gallery, Chicago.

Nothing — Margaret Atwood

Nothing like love to put blood
back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks and shards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone and liquid fishegg, desert
and saltmarsh, a green push
out of death. The vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softening pebbles as around skin. The sky's
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. It tastes of
salt. What touches you is what you touch.

Alex Lemon

 

Louise Erdrich

 

Deer

 

 

Anguish — August Friedrich Schenck, 1878

 

Kathleen Ryan

 Bad Fruit

Little Death — Malgorzata Kalinowska

Malgorzata Kalinowska

Tram Drey

 

Tram Drey made a shotgun, complete with shells, (this may initially seem redundant, but I mean shotgun shells, not crustaceans), out of crab.

Pacific, 1967 — Alex Colville

 

Phil Hale

 

 

Pandemonium - George Grosz, 1919

 

Secret Admirer

 

Autographs

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Dr. Seuss

 

White Noise, Don DeLillo

 

Fine Just the Way It Is, Annie Proulx

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

Barkskins, Annie Proulx

The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis

 

Kinder Than Man - Athea Davis

 

The Witching Hour - Andrew Wyeth

 

The Dead Miner (Mourning the Master) - Charles Christian Nahl, 1867

 

The Clay and the Potter - Aitor Frias & Cecilia Jimen

 

The Witch - John Collier, 1893

 

Ron Francis

 

Ron Francis