Torsade Literary Space Demimonde (poem)
Demimonde Starting fresh a heart for bold endeavor The probing intellect makes like an inspector For as the renovators have the door ajar The walls pulled down floes of plaster Pushed by traversing traffic to shore Up against sawbucks chunks of gear Where cords lie plugged together The tiles hexagonal shorn flakes […]
And Still (poem)
And Still And still, they know nothing of laying pipes, or stacking bricks They would be curious and agog at these Shyly confer upon themselves nobility Of feeling, of sensitivity To let the layers lay and the stackers stack And still, they know nothing of policing streets Certain they have not and […]
Assorted Opinions: Unnecessary Words
Assorted Opinions One Size Fits None Have you ever felt that when a celebrated author flouts Strunk and White-ish dos and don’ts (passive voice, adverbs, use of, that vs. which, etc.), her trailblazing gives hope to the little people? (And every time you’re told […]
La Catastrophe de la Martinique: two
Jean Hess La Catastrophe de la Martinique Preface continued (two) The fifth of May, when the volcano ravaged the valley of the Rivière-Blanche, and the approaches to the Prêcheur, he alerted Paris. The sixth of May, when the volcano, in devastating the valley of the Rivière des […]
Yoharie: Totem-World
Yoharie Totem-World “There’s speculation Southey only did it as a kind of meta-joke…not to be inclusive, the way we talk about it now, but just to make a puzzle. One no one could work out the answer to. The few times his publisher issued any communication from him…I say […]
Explication (poem)
Explication Morbid feet on a ruminant’s road They are speaking likenesses of nervous rounding More than an anthropologist’s brush off An antelope’s roaming is found to be enough By epoch’s end we have all gone soft And taken to occupy our cushions gravely fanning a white layer of flesh Wise to keep […]
Translation: Jean Hess, La Catastrophe de la Martinique (one)
Jean Hess La Catastrophe de la Martinique (notes of a reporter) 1902 To the lost souls of forty thousand of Saint-Pierre I dedicate this work of a reporter. Preface Forty thousand victims… This statistic is not exact […]
May Day: Flash Fiction
May Day Gougher, the man Dria had thought he ought to sponsor, the man who’d undertaken digging a pond with a shovel, the man who suffered, in some way Dria’s church friends were too delicate to ask… Anthony Vrenick had the thing in mind. If Gougher […]
The Totem-Maker: Jealousy (part three)
The Totem-Maker Jealousy (part three) Now, the owners of these fields were townsmen. The town, behind its wall, sat central to the plateau, sited high in a bowl among fertile slopes; these descending from a naked peak leagues off, and trimmed by Cime’s boundary road. This, for a space, ran […]