“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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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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Two blocks from the house I grew up in sit the remains of the Sarnia General Hospital. I still miss it. After all, I was born there on October 15, 1993; and my father was born there on February 17, 1947; and his father died at a hospital nearby on January 13, 2000. And that’s not even the end of it: the family name came back when his father died at the Sarnia General Hospital on May 29, 1951. My great-grandfather’s son also died there on July 30, 1992; and so did his daughter on September 13, 1996. Runs in the family, I suppose.
We used to play hide-and-seek around the remains of the hospital late at night. Some of the windows on the fourth floor were still in place; others were boarded up with beat-up sheets of plywood, which let drafts of air and animals inside, amongst other things.…
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Take Up
Meeting, kissing, thinking, not thinking, talking, not talking. No need to think and talk. No need to wonder why anything is. It just is. This is what love is. It’s about passion. It’s about the sex. The sex is passionate. It is brilliant. Yes.
Shake Up
So much so all my past experiences are thrown into the air. I am questioning everything that went for sex before. How could I have lived the years I’ve lived and never seen sex could be like this? All my ideas and former awarenesses break up; go bitty. Rattle around.
Fake Up
I am happy in the bedroom but…..
What about sometimes when we are out together? What about when we are sitting at the table, say? Or sitting down together somewhere not at the table?…
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Walt takes no comfort reminiscing about his youth. Tales of simpler times and way back when settle like pits in his stomach. For those with nothing to hide, perhaps long-ago decades truly were simpler. But for those free only in shadow, secretly living beyond acceptable societal standards, those memories breed only misery.
His grandchildren bring him pictures they find in his wife’s “treasure” boxes. They shove crinkled black and white images in his face and ask him questions about “olden days”. Each one slices open an unhealed wound, a shattered dream, a life dismantled. When he’s on the edge of tears, he picks up a newspaper and pretends to read. Walt’s wife steps in, nudging the children away from his recliner. Grandpa is old, she tells them, his hearing isn’t what it used to be.…
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Tobacco-stained fingernails dug into Radha’s flesh.
She started to protest, but he squeezed her wrist. Her words shrank into a yelp that bubbled from her lips. She didn’t understand why he was so angry; then again, he never needed a reason.
She struggled against his grip, and he twisted her wrist as hard as he could. There was a muffled crack, and her vision went white.
Radha woke with tears in her eyes. She glanced around and realized that she had fallen asleep on the couch in her living room. She dried her eyes and massaged her throbbing wrist. It should have healed by now, but it still ached whenever a storm was coming.
She sat up and stared out of the window.…
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1321. Lunchtime. But this P2WM5 is due 1500.
No time for a sit-down. J1N1 sends in sandwiches.
I doff my heels, unbutton my collar, and eat at my picture window.
My last promotion, they were surprised when I chose this 5th-floor office. A non-corner-office; furniture outmoded; and so low! I said: ‘I have acrophobia.’
I couldn’t say: ‘I want to look, one last year, out of the eyes of the beast.’ This picture window looks into the slum across the road.
The men are coming home for lunch. From where? From that corner. Beyond that corner, my picture window doesn’t see. The men are mostly autorickshaw drivers.
Some of the young men, who’ve acquired broken English, work as shop assistants. They don’t come home for lunch.…
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