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January 2011

3 posts

Write About Breakfast

I stand in front of my refrigerator for 5 minutes, sometimes 10, wondering what I can cobble together for breakfast. My stomach rumbles like this_____________. “What can I make with one egg, some margarine, leftover parm cheese and rice?” New York 1 news is on in the background. All at once, I’m listening for Weather on the Ones, and for Pat Kiernan to say something snotty...

City Burial (Write About Cold)

There was a lot of gray. I remember that many men wore gray suits and held gray, somber faces. I can’t remember much about the colors of that day—there probably were none. His father’s head was full of gray. His mother’s head had none (Clairol perfect color perhaps?) His sisters wore shades of black. Some pieces of clothing lighter than the others. Gray bars layered to...

Write About Something New

There was no familiarity in anything. Touching your ear and nose and neck was all new. No memorized crevices or comfortable spots. Each reaction was new. I didn’t expect you to breathe like that. Or moan like that. Or look at me like that. I wanted to see what it felt like to do something new with someone I’ve never known before. It’s awkward because there was no choreography....

May 2010

2 posts

Afternoon Snack

It looked like a slug. The dollop of hummus that fell onto her keyboard while she ate lunch and read the paper online. It made her jump. It made her wonder where the slug could have come come from. Did a mama slug get lost on its way to Rancho Cucamonga or perhaps Des Moines? Little slug eggs strayed on their way to birth—Found in a bathtub, then squirted onto this laptop. (What...

It was as good as anything. I was a little disappointed, It’s entirely believable to believe this Hear the sound of the vase. She wore a gray suit and would say, “Flowered dress around productive routine,” Then it was okay. She smiled and you respected it. She’s my affair with that bubble, A finely shaped skull. Very common. What happened to that white cushioned...

March 2010

1 post

Charlie the Perv

I saw a disgruntled banana rowing with one broken oar in Prospect Park the other day. He turned and turned in circles as the geese and ducks swam to the edge of the lake to pick up bread crumbs. He cursed out loud in a strange berry vernacular. Shit became strawberries. Fuck figs. Assholes apples. “I hate this strawberrybag apple figging up my boat ride!” he yelled into the clouds as...

November 2009

3 posts

An amazing thing happened today: He became my somebody and I became his. What I wrote when we first met: it’s cold outside and the bed is too large. This room is empty and it’s missing a night light. Every time I close my eyes, I see the scratches from my pupils. Lightning bolts in my eyelids. The absence of light makes it easier to see. There are 5, maybe 50 scratches. I forgot how...

We knew the lighthouse as much as you could know anything concrete and solitary. It’s light blinked once fast and twice slow and once fast again and we knew we were. My doppelganger gets seasick. I tell her to look into the light. She refuses. I do not get seasick. I wonder if this is the difference that un-doppelgangers us. My doppelganger wears the red Keds I wore last summer. There is a hole...

“I had a dream last night that we were in the backseat of a car being driven through some frozen blue-stained nowhere, you, me, and marc hug. we could see our breath and there were empty wine bottles on the floor. you took off my glove and held my hand.” “kind of an interesting opening paragraph for a story. did we make it out alive?” “I don’t think we were...

October 2009

4 posts

This is an exercise in building a sentence. It is...

Norv strangled love. Norv strangled a love. Norv strangled an undying, unflagging, unwavering, universal love. Norv idly, heedlessly strangled an undying, unflagging, unwavering, universal love. Norv idly, heedlessly strangled an undying, unflagging, unwavering, universal love for Tomlinson, for Rivers. Marking time, Norv idly, heedlessly strangled an undying, unflagging, unwavering,...

Painting ballerinas

The bus is driving 15, maybe 20 miles per hour (maybe 60?). The dashes on the road move in slow motion. Daaaaash. Daaaaash. Daaaaash. The ballerinas in the painting are hungry. Poised in forever plies. The left one has eyes that say, “Will you bring me a Snickers bar? Please?” The original paint by numbers code called for purple in the background, but the artist, in an...

Dear __________, I’m writing to submit my resignation. In two weeks, we’ll no longer bicker about the arbitrary placement of commas, the lack of lookie-loos, the quiet emptiness that creates a distance now too large for us to connect with one another. I’m not sure if it’s your age or hair color or social status but we never did connect. The closest we came was after his...

“You look like Ripley,” he says. It’s a Sunday night. “You look like Ripley from Alien.” I’m wearing a purple loose tank and black boy shorts. My hair is wild around my face. It’s probably the nicest thing anyone has said about me, about my looks, at least. Ripley can do anything. She can suck aliens out into the vacuum of space. She can fall asleep for...

September 2009

5 posts

Mann's Doctor Faustus is incred and mind blowing,...

I think I wanted something magic, like fingers that line up evenly in the space between yours’ and being the right height so you don’t slouch when holding hands. I know there is no magic. There is a gradually expanding universe exploding in slow motion and it would take a very strong microscope indeed to see the lines in my eyes. There are places so deep, this diving bell crumbles...

Donna had been trying to untie this knot for 10, no, 20 minutes now. She pulled at the knotted yarn with her teeth. (Incisors to strings, some saliva catching and drying on the individual strands). Maybe if she ripped right though it, the stubborn twists would come undone. She held the yellow, green and red ball in her lap, the freed strings laying flat across her right thigh. Donna’s...

Double Shots (another day in Lost City, WV)

Whiskey, ice, glass. Repeat. (Vision blurs as vowels loosen.) Listen: Take it from me kid. You don’t want to be like this. Run away. Run quickly. Fill it up again. Oooh oooh, ah. That burns. Drink it like this. Head back. Tilt glass. Throat hot. Lips plump. Dry tongue. Fast tongue. Quick, drink another before the effect wears off. What do you see? Double vision. Double shots. Double...

I can see through you. I can’t see you at all. We stand, arm’s akimbo, legs askance. We stand strong, like John Wayne. I must confess, I feel more Lee Marvin myself. This will not be it. It will not be our last stand. We play at pulling pistols, may even take the safety off. But I will not, we will not make that perfect round hole in another chest. We will not look down to see...

Just finished reading Cassanda at the Wedding at...

Really brilliant, lots of Plato in-jokes you’ll get even if you don’t read a lot of Plato (I don’t) and lots of prescriptive grammar musings. There’s this part at the end where the narrator says: One thing about being alive is that you can swim. Other things too - you can look at the clouds in the daytime and the stars at night and think of space as something you...

August 2009

9 posts

Here’s the truth about it, though: we wish we were still the night people we were ten years ago. Now we are the people on the couch at 10:30 eating handfuls of popcorn. It’s obvious. We wrapped our hands around the chain-linked fence. You had never seen the pool before. If we could see the moon, it would have reflected off the cracked blue floor. Instead, it was dark, empty. I bent...

Dear J, I don’t want to see your balls. Or any of your genitalia whatsoever. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the country these days—the need for wanting to look at a grown man’s genitalia and whatnot. Back in my day, we only looked at drawings of genitalia, and usually, only women. Or at least, that’s what I’d like you to think. Sincerely yours, AKR ...

What the hell is this?

Oh dear, my ear, not here she said. The fear the fear the fear. Not your ear, he said, your rear, your rear. (akr)

Things that happen in the night

The streetlight casts yellow on the empty sidewalk as stray cats walk up and down searching for food. The black one says, “Rrreow.” The tiny white one observes. Waits to pounce. A couple walks home with leftover food from that night’s dinner. Spaghetti sauce leaks into the lining of the woman’s purse. Her shoes hurt the balls of her feet. One toe is pinched. He’s...

Once the letter was mailed, we waited in a state of anticipation. Susan, the youngest of us, sat in the front yard the day we licked the envelop and found a stamp in the utensil drawer. She wanted to extend the rusted metal flag herself, but couldn’t reach the top of the mailbox, not even on her very tip toes. She blamed it on the ditch the area around the mailbox had become - so much rain...

The grass was unruly on the slope of the hill by the railroad tracks. A man, a volunteer, would take his ridermower around the adjacent playground. The hill was too steep, however, for any riders. We bent our knees at hard angles to traverse the expanse. We were barefoot, no socks to cover our delicate ankles. No fear of ticks haunted us yet. The only thing on our minds was collecting the...

From Eileen's Poem "Kurt"

I took her first line and riffed off it: The weekend you died was really a big deal for both of us. I had to wake her to tell her what happened. My cousin called from California to explain. The conversation had been a weird one. It sounded like the mouthpiece of his phone was wrapped in cheese cloth. His voice was a shaking whisper. I wondered if his throat felt tight. I felt like he was so far...

Dear ___________________, I called to tell you this: “______________” and this, “___________________.” I sensed it was something you didn’t want to hear. Mostly because you called me an asshole. Not to my face, but I know you said it. You said, “Bitch, cunt.” You said, “Call me one day when you’re crying, miserable, done with your life.”...

I remembered it differently at first, but he was right, it was in Japan. I can remember everything else. The sterility of the air. The uncomfortable waiting chairs we sat in before. There was a lot of gray. An absence of smell. Gray carpet, gray walls. Garbage doesn’t smell bad in Japan. (Or maybe it was all white?) They had massage chairs for the weary. 595 yen for 10min. A man slept in...

July 2009

10 posts

A morality tale

Morality moved into Mortality’s old house. Mortality moved to New Mexico, you see. A dry climate was better for Mortality’s lungs and back. Who’s feeling their age, now? Morality likes her new neighborhood. She painted the shutters light blue from that hideous army green. She did it over a long weekend. Vice came over to help. Avarice was unavailable. He said he was on a beach...

Apple Woman, Pair of Pears

A woman shaped like an apple walked down the street eating a pear today. A pair of german shepherds crossed in front of her, tied together with a leash held by their german master, Klaus. Klaus too was eating a pear. The pear core crumbled in Apple lady’s hands as she chewed the last bit. She threw it into the intersection, and wiped her sticky palms on her canvas pants. A car drove by at...

With apologies to WCW and AKR's pears

Dear Sir, I regret to inform you that your plums are missing in action. I saw you place them in the communal refrigerator this morning, and by 3 PM on this, the 29th of July, they were gone. I would assume you ate them yourself if you hadn’t run around screaming, “My plums! My plums! My only plums!” (And really, sir, is that the best way to conduct yourself in this, a place for...

A woman shaped like an apple walked down the street eating a pear today. All the boys I love live on Leonard street. Pinky promises make me want to keep you, flirt. There is a girl with giant breasts who wants to join our after-school ice cream club. At last Sunday’s picnic, you flew an orange kite into my hair. (akr)

Old poems are comforting on rainy days.

Riff off a famous Picard line

There are four lights in my grandfather’s house They go off in this progression: green, blue, red, yellow. They brighten up his corners in that little white box he calls home. My grandfather keeps three bourbons in his house. They are Makers Mark and two others that I forget. The light reflects through the bottles, making ghostly amber shapes on the walls and our faces. There are...

I was going to write a postcard. It was going to say: Dear ____________: I am naked and you are not here. There is a mirror with your fingerprints and I touch each spot. 1. 2. 3. I have been sitting waiting for your stare. Your breath. I breathe. Tired, I put my clothes back on. Clean the mirror with Windex and yesterday’s newspaper. Love, _______________ (akr)

I want to write about the dark. About my first night here, waking up in a black hole room wondering where the hell I am. This cabin is in the middle of the Adirondack park covered by tall trees. Pine trees, I think. There are no street lights and sometimes you can’t see the moon. It is dark, like I had never opened my eyes. Dark like how I imagined the inside of the refrigerator would be...

For some reason I thought I carried around a black pen. Maybe it was there but I took it out for some reason. Maybe I meant to put it in there but never did. Either way, all I could find was this one. It’s not ideal, but what to do? I’m a little disturbed but the feeling will pass. I was going to write a postcard. It was going to say: Dear ____________: Here’s a note written...

sometimes I do this thing..

where I write out line of a song I like and then keep writing until I stop to jump start myself. I guess I’ve been listening to a lot of Bon Iver lately and wrote this in my notebook last night: We said, “Look that one’s yours.” We pointed down across the coast White peaks and white crests waiting for the ships to come in we watied on the widows peaks like generations...