An interviewer asked a famous writer: “How do you know what your characters are going to say?”
“Because they’ve already spoken,” she responded. “They’re real people and I’m just trying to remember what they said.”
“Then you aren’t really writing fiction?”
“I’m adding fiction to life,” the writer said, “making up a parallel world.”
“So much for your much-admired imagination,” the interviewer said.
(Pause)
“So, a famous writer was being interviewed,” the writer said in a somber voice, “by someone who kept questioning her methods and integrity. After putting up with it for as long as she could, the famous writer took a pistol from her purse and carefully shot the interviewer in his left eye.”
(Another pause)
“That’s not funny,” the interviewer said.
“Perhaps not,” the writer said, “but it’s not entirely fictional, either.”…
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It was almost funny – the way his was flattened across the satin pillow that propped him up like a doll. Everything was so incredibly deflated, as if someone had hooked him up to an air pump, blown him up real big, and then forgot to tie up the holes so that the air leaked out– whistling out through the nose, leaking out between the tiny lines that encompassed the balls of his eyes, heaving out of his mouth to leave him deflated. His cheeks were like a giant whoopee cushion except with his ears jutting out at the sides, and headphones plugged in as if he was listening to a soundtrack we couldn’t hear.
Maybe that’s why I wasn’t sad.
It was all so odd.…
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Randy’s wish
I’ve rented a motor boat for two hours. I’m in a maroon tee and bermuda shorts, waiting for Jane. The twilight is a tint of orange with threads of red rising from the horizon, which may not last long, unlike her presence that placates my soul.
I have known her for sometime, only know that she works for a store, but it’s enough data. Love, they say, is blind.
But I have a point to prove, and have long waited for this moment, like a poor Alaskan waiting for years to get to Florida, away from the sucker cold. Worse, I was treated like a pole a dog would lift its legs to pee on, and using the smell as a mark for other dogs to shame me and my competence.…
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I believe you will turn toward me in the morning,
powered by an almighty need
to confirm I am still on this earth,
that what is seen and unseen still lives between us.
This is one thing I must have
the only thing that can trigger the day
that is begotten of our agreement.
You are the sun god of us,
the truth that turns the orbit
of being loved on this earth for me.
Through this love, I feel the warm rays of a brighter
salvation from afar,
come down from heaven,
by the power of you, through you,
incarnate in your arranging the blanket so my shoulders
are made warm.
For my sake, you brushed away the debts I owe you,
you suffered, but didn’t bury the pain of all those slights and insensitivities.…
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LG 1967–2013
when I brought you into my country
everywhere I had gone became
the town or river of a child and
you renamed it to your own music
and you were singing even though I
had broken into the refrain and
would do so again on leaving the
one mild country of your tune and words
I could hear the music of the child
you used to be when we talked in June
and knew nothing would interrupt it
in your time or out not even this
– Rodney Nelson…
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They stood at the top of the mountain. The hot breeze blew against their sweaty faces. The green pine poked into the clear sky. At the summit they stood on smooth boulders. They had climbed it many times. They knew each crevice, crack and hold. Gerard dropped his pack, and sat on a boulder facing south. Lionel stood and breathed the air rising from the stretching Adirondacks below.
It had been a long hike up. The hard rain from the day before turned the trail to mud. They slipped more than once. Lionel enjoyed the challenge. Gerard complained the entire way.
Lionel hated standing there. He hated for the journey to end. He hated the rising smooth boulders of the last two miles before reaching the summit.…
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these stairs are designed to murder a man
who’s had too much to drink
narrow, they wind like a medieval dungeon
to a bathroom that smells like death
upstairs where i left my wife alone
you can hear the six german men laughing
crowded around the tiny bar over their bottles of astra
and that black liquor the bartender keeps pouring out
i can still eat their cigarette smoke in the air down here
fourteen years off of those things
and i still think about cigarettes every day
think about them more than love or my own mortality
i wonder what i’m doing here clasping the sweating wall
in a german dive bar where i don’t belong
four thousand miles away from brooklyn problems
beers deep into an early hamburg afternoon
i’ve understood next to nothing that anyone has said to me today
i’ve done nothing to make myself heard
the light from the bottom of the stairs
looks like an oubliette
and i’m tired of trying to make this world my own
if i ever make it back up those steps
i think i’ll grab one of those german’s cigarettes
smoke it until i’m sweating and sick
like the first time i ever had one of those things
ask those laughing bastards
what their german word is for sadness or loss.…
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