It was 90 degrees outside and over 100 inside the coffee shop, where I’d been running a weekly storytelling show on Saturday nights. The coffee shop’s owner hoped the show would bring people in and asked me to organize it. I agreed on the condition that I could run it as a curated show and not an open mic. She said yes, but kept pressuring me to give stage time to people who wandered in off the street. “No,” I’d say, week after week. “We talked about this. It’s not an open mic.” But every week she’d forget because she feared people would never return if I didn’t put them onstage.
“Onstage” was a bit of a stretch. The coffee house had no stage and no lighting to distinguish the “stage area” from the rest of the space. …
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As she slips the five bucks into my cup, I look up from the sidewalk and mumble, “God bless you.” An exhilarating shock runs through me as I watch her saunter down the street, a cluster of bittersweet memories bursting upon my mind. My wife… That’s my wife… Was my wife.
No longer that distant figure on the charred landscape of my youth, no longer a nocturnal phantom haunting my tent under the overpass, but a person of flesh and blood, proof that I once lived and loved in this city that now recoils from my poverty and despair. I get to my feet and stumble after her as she window-shops, her hand gently pulling a young boy along. Over the last fifteen years I dreamed about her a lot… but not so much lately.…
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we were watching the Scandinavian version of “The Bridge”
though I had sworn off anything described as unflinching.
I didn’t mind being a spectator, but the great variety of pain
that was mine: I was tired of its reflection. Who has not
witnessed the separation of love from the body it was written in?
– Samn Stockwell
Author’s Note: I have never recollected anything in tranquility, yet this poem feels unhurried, so I am pleased to have achieved that. This poem is only 3 sentences, so it doesn’t have much room to create the feel of complete action. It follows the simple arc of an idea and that is the poem’s sole movement. The way movement is often accomplished is through repetition, shifts, and juxtapositions – all harder to do successfully in a short poem, of course.…
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Another day, another mass shooting.
Another day, another mass shooting.
At 4 am, baby kicks me awake,
and I read about the latest in El Paso, Texas
and Dayton, Ohio.
A witness describes a six month old
swaddled in blood.
I am due in thirteen days.
Yesterday morning, I wished
he would come.
Now I want him to wait.
I will stay inside the house.
He can stay inside me.
– Francine Rubin…
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I remember the moment when I began hating my music. I’d stood with an acoustic guitar off to one side of the lead vocalist. Sporadic hand-clapping rippled from the audience. The hotel half-filled. Couples mostly. The band glanced around at each other. A song with lyrics I wrote years ago started. Lyrics used to come to me back then, the way some people describe visions. One second my fingertips tapping to tunes the band gave me like heartbeats in a small animal. Then I’d write the words in crooked lines across paper. Later I sang them inside rooms, lyrics and guitar throbbing dully off walls.
Something fell out of me that night. I played on, strings blunt under fingers. The band continued, at times their eyes half-closed as if mesmerised by the surges of music.…
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While Christmas shopping one December almost twenty years ago, I chanced upon a cute tin with a beaming Santa and one word, COAL, on its cover. Curious, I opened the tin, and there, nestled inside, was a single, honest-to-goodness lump of coal. I did not hesitate. I threw that tin into my basket and headed for the register. Then I spent far too much time in the days before that Christmas pondering and calculating: Who was the most deserving recipient of the COAL that year? You see, the COAL tradition in our family was new to us that year, but it follows the old coal-in-the-stocking tradition that most of us have heard of, if not been threatened with. It will likely surprise no one that the year I bought the COAL, two of my three children were teenagers.…
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I just got word. My elementary school’s scheduled for demolition tomorrow. It’s a devastating announcement. Something doesn’t sit right with deliberately tearing down a building built to educate—to encourage learning. This place was the primary setting of my childhood; now in a matter of hours, it’ll be bulldozed, and all that’ll remain is a pile of dusty rubble over its concrete foundation. It was my foundation too. I’m stunned. That blocky brick building where I pined after my first crushes and learned to read and write. Gone. My childhood, leveled. What becomes of memories once their physical tether’s been removed?
In fourth grade, we had this grueling geology exam where we circled the classroom like vultures, identifying rock samples laid out on desks. I failed it—miserably.…
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