I would never use the word if it weren't for the fact that no one has the ability to use another. I don't look for synonyms for 'bicycle." It is suitable for all referencing. There are two cycles, two circles, two wheels. I use it irrespective of whether the word suits my taste. I use … Continue reading Feather Dusters, Full Moons and Bloggers [Flash Fiction]

The exchange of our personal facts is too free and too easy. The kind of information exchanged today is the kind we kept close or offered only to our kin. Now we open the book to those who are not kin and a lot less than kind. But then facts are in themselves things made, … Continue reading Permeation [Flash Fiction]

I sit with espresso in a cup, I bought the other day, made in  Portugal. I used to have plates fired in Portugal. What having had plates from Portugal has to do with having a coffee cup made in Portugal is beyond me. I am having a piece of pastry leftover from her birthday two … Continue reading Recollections in Something Other than Tranquility [Flash Fiction]

What else is there to say about the wilderness, a social landscape laid barren, made waste by our social and political ineptitude. Yes, what could I say about the desert we have understood from how many of our formative stories--Moses, the Baptist, Jesus, Mohammed, who else in the wastelands of societies and their politics. Call … Continue reading Into the Wild [Flash Fiction]

I cannot imagine a world without wine. I can imagine Paris without people who are not French. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to imagine such a heinous thing as a world without wine; I cannot fathom the thinking during prohibition that lead fucking Protestant gringos in American California to destroy three and four hundred year … Continue reading Cruel and Unusual Punishment [a Short-short Story]

There were no ice flows in the Seine that February--we were there in February? Crazy to be in Paris in the winter. Who goes to Paris in the winter? Many, though, it seemed, at least from the observations made in our wanderings--the lines for the Eiffel Tower were long--but it was cold, very f*%&ing cold. … Continue reading D’Arc that Brings Light

[ . . . ] . . . so look for Serial Essays upcoming in February and March, particularly "Gay Marriage" and "In Itself American." The former every Tuesday through February and March; the latter, every Wednesday in February and March, culminating on the final Thursday, the 31st. You must dedicate yourself to reading, which means penetrating the text, … Continue reading Serialized Essays [Flash Fiction]

Do me a favor, take that newspaper and press it to your nose, no do it, trust me, I'm not going to do anything fucked up, just put to your nose, up against it, your nose to the paper, good, now  keep it there, do not move it no matter what I ask you to … Continue reading Beyond Living [Flash Fiction]

  I can spell cannot be the call out of our literacy. No it cannot. A, B, C, D and so on, yes, Alpha, Beta . . . what next? I do not mis-spell my name and so I should say that I am proud of my literacy? Reciting the alphabet is not in itself … Continue reading Spell, Spelling, Spelled; The Magic of Technology [Flash Fiction]

[reverse via the paragraphs] How many times do I ask myself who I am? I live a life and only occasionally wonder about what should be the surest thing in that life, my being. What do I know better than my to be or not? What could I know as well? Why being at all … Continue reading Being with a Bow [Flash Fiction]

To kill or not to kill, that might be a question, if not the. Is it nobler to imagine a world where killing would be unnecessary? How many slings and arrows of fortune should I have to endure? Is it be better to end them by ending their source, Or continue to sleepwalk my way … Continue reading Questions To Be [Flash Fiction]

Lesbian, in other words Witch; or should this be otherwise: Witch, in other words, Lesbian. --The Author Marriage--as it has been discussed by persons in various cultures, codified by laws and/or customs, ritualized in religious practices and understood by how a people anywhere define it, giving it specified and special resonance in the words used--must … Continue reading An Author’s Preface to a Lost Story: Marriage is as Marriage Does [Flash Fiction]

Here is an extract from a previously published critique of American Government by a man given to diatribes in his essay writing, but not incoherent rants, and of course you should be saying right now that there is a connotative difference between diatribe and rant, and the one given here is that diatribe has more … Continue reading Bureaucrats, Politicians and Cronies [Flash Fiction]

[. . .] IV Popularity and plurality have taken over our ethics, which is why we always defer to star actors and actresses as spokesmen or spokeswomen. Truth is numerical, arithmetic, additional. This is the prelude to the will to power. This is what we suffer socially and economically today. We have no other reasons … Continue reading Popularity is not Plurality [Flash Fiction]

III Again, doubt, doubt and more doubt is what we teach, what we expect, what we receive from our ideas that there is no Truth, there is nothing transcendent, there are no absolutes, there is no Absolute, and, of course, that everything is relative, itself an error a lot less than human. We have become … Continue reading Sum Total [Flash Fiction]

  I reveal certain prejudices when I say Beauty--a neo-Romanticism we might conclude, but then the Romantics had more heart while yet keeping their heads. I don't have to look long to see how in love with doubt as a form of wisdom I have come to be in this culture--just reveal that you actually … Continue reading Reason Truth Beauty [Flash Fiction]

  Facts, facts and more facts--give me nothing but facts, or so we could say Mr Gradgrind would say . . . did say in similar words, I remember Hard Times by Dickens. I read it for an Urban Sociology class now nearly four decades ago. Ours is another call for needful things. The one … Continue reading The Highest Wisdom [Short-short Fiction]

From a law student's notebook found on a chair next to the chair the editor of this review sat at for lunch at 9 Tastes Thai on JFK Blvd. in Cambridge one semi-chilly afternoon in early May waiting for an undergraduate student who was attending Harvard at the time Once a suspect goes to trial, … Continue reading Guilty versus Not Guilty [Flash Fiction]

Midwives would have managed the induced miscarriages in any society. They would have left themselves opened to the accusations of witchcraft. You cannot imagine that this was not true for most places in medieval Europe and elsewhere. Now, even if induced miscarriage could always be made to look like accidental miscarriage, and thus be a … Continue reading The Pursuit of Property [Flash Fiction]

My feet dig themselves in the sands as one two three or five gulls want a jump on low tide here pecking for clams, back ad forth they go avoiding the wakes that drown my feet over my ankles in the surf soaked sands.

The word 'form' is from the Latin forma. Forma also translates, beauty. In the Roman mind, as in the Greek, beauty was always in form. It had to be in form. Only in form could beauty exist. So, form is beauty? Beauty form? I know where this is going; I suspect you do as well. … Continue reading Form, Beauty, Truth

[. . .], so then, an individual human life is plural---singular, certainly, yet plural. A paradox; a conundrum? Of course this singular-plural life is both a paradox and a conundrum. What then should I--do I have to--say about the individual human life? Any choice a person makes in determining his I-ness amounts to an oppression of … Continue reading A Fragment Abridged [Flash Fiction]

Small Press, Big Impression To write or not to write, that is the question every writer faces, must ask himself or herself, at what answer or response is it aimed? I am shooting arrows blind. How many days is it acceptable to let pass when writing a blog--is this a blog? Is it not a … Continue reading How Many Days Should You Let Pass When You Are Writing a Blog?

This I is persistently we. Of this, I am certain, but then this kind of offhanded certainty often masquerades as science. Again, I know that I is we mostly by faith. To know; to have faith--I do not want to put one or the other above either in any ascendancy, faith or science. We becomes … Continue reading The Self Toward Philosophy [Flash Fiction]

To be or not to be is the fundamental philosophical question; it is not only a question of suicide; it is to mediate being, to choose an actual existence, thus to remove oneself from becoming, from the flux of perpetual becoming which has always been non-being, as close to a primordial nothingness as anything related … Continue reading I Cannot Get Myself to Believe in a Primordial Nothingness [Flash Fiction]

for Emerson A man, a person, an American, a New Yorker, educated, we like to say, university so, speaks of himself in relation to his Self, mostly incidentally, on paper, but as if he were talking to friends over drinks waiting for dinner as they do sometimes, several of them, have diner together for no … Continue reading Self-Relevance [Flash Fiction]

The difficulty anyone faces when trying to connect with another is that the I is already a plurality. I am we, for sure. There is no room left for anyone else, it seems, or so I believe. Of course we are familiar with Shakespeare's all the world's a stage . . . all the Self … Continue reading The I is We [Flash Fiction]

DOUBLE-EDGED AXE I would like to live in the trees with the chimps. I am not sure that even the chimp-me could beat a baby baboon against a tree. It’s not if a chimp were me, but if I were a chimp? Take the baby baboon by the feet and swing thus . . . … Continue reading Labyrinth [Flash Fiction]

What though is the Self? Could it perhaps remain distinct categorically from what we mean by psychology, mentality or personality? Who am I inside? Who do I become outside? Outside in this place, at that time, here or there, then or now . . . wherever however whenever? Should I ask, what are they, when … Continue reading I Cannot for the Life of Me Delineate the Differences between Self and Soul [prose poem]

daylight fading shadows stretching infant fingers into their skin Source: Haiku ii

[ . . . ] Mind is certainly void of any tactility as is also the human soul--and I reassert herein the tangibility of both mind and soul irrespective of either having no tactility. Tactility, we must remember, is not the sole verifier of the real. I am not going to play ping-pong between the … Continue reading Competing Acceptance [Flash Fiction]

An editor republishes in his current review an editorial he published in another review he was publishing on line as many as ten years ago. This piece is a reprint of an earlier version, revised, How could I resist reissuing this critique of one of America's great agencies of control and information gleaning for the State, … Continue reading Spy, Spying, Spied [A Short-short Story]

The Falling Leaf Review is managed as a critical journal, and the writing is in the tradition of essay writing as inherited through a nearly five hundred year old legacy begun with Montaigne. I don't want to debate the merits of this tradition, nor do I want to defend Western Civilization as it seems to … Continue reading To the Breach Once More [A Short Story]

  He is who is he is as I have said before about others in one or another circumstance. Who he is when he is where he is how he is--I am who I am even if I forget who I am, not necessarily from amnesia but how everyone forgets himself from time to time. … Continue reading Sometimes in the Mirror [Flash Fiction}

Nausea comes and goes in waves. An ocean of nausea. Tides come in and tides go out. Storm surges raise the height of the waves sometimes, overcome as you are with this special nausea. I remember one time after having seen a production of Beckett’s Endgame, I met up with friends and drank myself until … Continue reading Mourning Becomes Nausea [Flash Fiction]