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 […]
My Blog Week: April 22 to April 28
All the Latest from Torsade! A Figure from the Common Lot, Book Two, Chapter Two, section ii, concluded this week, with the Everard family’s sad history reaching one of its culminations. On Monday, “Explication”, a new poem; Tuesday a new segment […]
Gone Before: part one
A Figure from the Common Lot Gone Before (part one) Verbena tucked her wiping rag into her apron band, slipping along the cupboard, her skirts brushing Honoré as he knelt by Ebrach’s trunk. She went to her husband’s chair, and took only his fingertips in hers. “Richard! I […]
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 […]
The Professor’s Fate: Hammersmith (three)
Hammersmith Chapter Three The Professor’s Fate He’d sat up in bed, and heard the rain still pelting, rat-a-tat-tatting off some plane of the inner house, where a leak had sprung. He’d known he wouldn’t sleep. The roar of the deluge appeared soporific enough for the Professor, curled on the bed’s […]
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 […]