Harry was tall and thin, elegant looking, silver-white hair; an older man, maybe 55 but what did I know? I was 13, maybe 14. It was hard to tell how old adults were. My father’s name was Harry so maybe that was why I felt safe with him. He started talking to me on the subway and I immediately responded, telling him how I wanted to be an actor, how I was coming home from rehearsal. Then it turned out we lived on the same block on the lower east side of Manhattan. Made sense. That’s why we were on the same train.
My father was fat and ugly, a mean man and it showed on his face. He hated me, hated that I was an actor.…
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Look, her almost bare stems bows away from glass,
casting charms and spells so you’ll face the glass.
Leaning towards light, this one expects you to play
like some little girl who’s not encased in glass.
Green, sharp and strict, still hoping. A soft sway
lights the words she needs to explain the glass.
Crossed as a sword, daring, calling today
shyly—come closer to her. She’ll tame the glass.
Commanding light to kiss her, calling May
out of April, she flies to perfectly shade the glass.
Almost straight as a delicate mast, gay
as a face card, reflecting the spray of glass.
Gather them all and mark their place—
Softly, gentle, careful not to break the glass.
– Mark J. Mitchell…
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This morning it poured my glass of Wild Turkey bourbon on A Farewell to Arms, made a paper airplane from an Appalachian Power bill, subscribed to Glamour magazine against my will. Sometimes it squirts toothpaste across my mustache and draws smiley faces on the mirror. It pinches baby cheeks on city buses, fixes tags on strangers’ t-shirts, texts my ex in the middle of the night.
It’s been three months since Moira packed her bags and moved out. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she said. The fighting, the infertility, my drinking—it was more than she could bear. But the affair was what finished us. I’d betrayed her body by giving mine to another. She wanted to forgive me, to move on, and she tried, but something had died between us that we couldn’t get back.…
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I referred to my stepfather as the Peanut Man for the majority of my kindergarten year. He hadn’t married in at that point, but his basketball shorts were in my mother’s closet and his mixed nuts in our cupboard. Nobody ate nuts but him. Thus, Peanut Man.
I still call him Jeff, but his name is on the mortgage and he came to my senior night for soccer. He moved me into college. He is my grade-school caricature, acclimated. We say “I love you” if I say it first.
Remarriage complicates love. Jeff’s introduction to me wasn’t watching his wife tear top-to-bottom to push out a product of them, but rinsing my blueberry-dyed vomit from Dora bedsheet while my mom scraped my crusted body with a washrag in a home that wasn’t yet his.…
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“Zurich-Basel departing from track eight,” says a woman’s buttery voice.
Zurich is a mispronunciation of Turicum which may itself be a variation on Turicon or possibly turris, tower or high building. Turicum’s gone. So is the turris, if it ever existed. Zurich remains. Life is so often an outcome of misconception.
Granite, marble and iron bend in a supple morning stretch. The spokes of the glass ceilings and the muntins of the vaulted windows convert sunbeams into dust-traced pillars. Luminous squares hopscotch the station hall.
Those who work here have christened it the ‘jail bars effect’. The cubicle-bound, the railway waiters, the bratwurst grillers are stationary, going no place. Wall-mounted flat screens flash ads. Timetables roll transient numbers at commuters. Strung up by their wings, kitsch sculptures dangle from the ceiling.…
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The act:
disappearing
the past, not dramatic
as it once was, reduce coated
paper
to black
white ash. Now a
click: gone forever, code
overwritten, the result is
the same:
you are
gone, I am here,
without. Over length, crimp,
curl of synapses, you appear,
or not,
your face
as true as I
remember, or not, &
your melodious voice is heard,
or not.
– Eugene Stevenson
Author’s Note: One of the reasons why I write is to make photographs from the daily rushes our lives produce. I cannot discard photos, no matter how painful. Some people do so easily, out of hurt, anger, resentment, or envy. Images that remain after the photos have been destroyed are those we carry in our heads & hearts.…
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When I first heard about snuff poetry readings, I was loudly skeptical. People have been trying to make poetry matter again, ever since it abandoned lyric to singer-songwriters, and left form to the good folks at Hallmark — who’ve since abandoned it — but the rumors and manifestos always come to nothing.
I pronounced the idea “morally suspect” because, let’s be honest, anything new or popular is bound to be.
From my point of view, the only Literary form worth pursuing is the neo-Tatlerian essay. Without that, we are nothing.
Still, I gave it a try, because I was stuck in a boarding lounge and I’d run out of other things to check on my phone. It was that or learn Armenian. Well, Byron learned Armenian and look what happened to him.…
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