A man and his manuscript in a cafe in Barcelona. A vacation sometime now several years ago. His mother is still alive, will be for at least another fourteen months when she will expire on his birthday, or so it will have been figured by the neurologist, just what dead is he will have no … Continue reading Other Eyes [Short Fiction]

The Minutes Buried [A Short Story]   If I were another kind of man, I might write something completely different from what I have here written, what I had written in the past, about my review, this literary review that had begun as a literary essay review, one I originally called The Literary Essay Review, the … Continue reading What If You Were Another Kind of Man?

He lives by the principles of universal democratic humanistic co-existence because he is not in a position to live as arbitrarily as his hypocritical self is inclined to do. If he had the means, he would join the hierarchically arranged social structure of economic and power elites, as so many with money or positions of … Continue reading Down Palace Walls [A Short Story]

The conch he had found on the shore in Rockaway he thinks he can remember, having had it for years on his dresser, always present on his dresser, the whole in its side a reminder of the tumult of life he tried to mean one day he also thinks he can recollect, remembering what he … Continue reading Cracked Conch [Flash Fiction]

Sunset behind the Verrazano Bridge is beautiful today he imagines she might think, seen as it would be from a standing vantage by the benches where she sits: She says she sees a little blonde girl in a blue dress with buttercups in her hand for mama "who sits on the bench," an offering, she adds … Continue reading Buttercups, a Pen and a Lunch Special not for Dinner [Flash Fiction]

[All words in quotes herein are verbatim from the lips of their speaker to the ears of this teller.] "My boy's running with other boys in the park by our home next to Gravesend Bay," he said, not out loud, under his breath, to feel the weight of the words on his tongue, he used to … Continue reading Running, Laughing, Leading [Flash Fiction]

A boy and a girl reach out their hands to each other standing in the grass behind the benches in a row along the path outlined by them and the grass behind, as I have said. This grassy place, in the park with the children that play away from the other children who rush and … Continue reading To Each or not to Each this Spring [Flash Fiction]

Cars in herds around the park on the streets around the park. Horns sounding now like sheep in flocks before shearing. I see a wasp on a daisy in the grass behind the bench I sit on in the park this late afternoon, rush-hour. Cacophony. I see a woman standing with her baby in her … Continue reading Bleating [Flash Fiction]

Time: Then. Place: There. He remembered having read that "truth is in tautology." He did not wonder who said that. He can only see himself obliquely in a past, a kind of vignetting in the mind . . . what is  that about tautologies? You might ask. A tautology  frames the essence of Truth--a truth is a truth … Continue reading A Robin is a Robin and not a Sparrow [Flash Fiction]

  I say so many things as I have said so many other things and will say yet so many more things. "So, If I save a life, I save the world?" He asks his friend who says that that's right, "Yes, that's what has been said," I say. "So, If I save myself, I … Continue reading What Many Would Call Trite [Flash Fiction]

Preface I woke to find myself in a dream, and in the dream I said what I said, clearly enough and to another and another, although I cannot recollect if in the dream I actually saw anyone's face, for I might have been talking only to myself in everything I said to another . . … Continue reading Of Himself Standing in a Dark Basement [Flash Fiction]

A man not so unlike any other man, but certainly in many details unlike every other man, this one and that one and another one, each of them (us) is part of the general scheme of things we call human, all too human, what we mean when we say that--what do we mean when we … Continue reading If [A Short Story]

A man speaks about a man who writes in his journal about what he sees as similarities between Kerouac and Thoreau in the matters of diction and voice,  world-view(?) and affinities for the characters they describe, and although he does so, this man speaking of another man,  he does do so without quotes or other … Continue reading Side-by-Side [Flash Fiction]

What is the Plain of Truth? I ask in earnest. I thinkI must set out into this world to look for this plainess. What is the plan--I must open the eyes, open the ears, empty the mind--thinking is in itself prejudice, no? That is belief, as I have said, I used to say. To know … Continue reading The Rats who Tried to Bell a Cat [A Short-short Story]

I don't understand the love that needs to lie to itself to go on loving, she said. She paused. She said no more on this. She continued to look out the kitchen window at the sparrows flocking on the fire escape this morning. If your son or daughter is an asshole, and I mean a … Continue reading In Two Hours; or, You Would be Mistaken [Flash Fiction]

Some formalist reflections on authorship--and I am not going to begin a journey some contemporary graduate school asshole is calling meta-reflection,which is what everyone in philosophy used tp understand by the term, 'meditation,' clearly not the meditation practiced by anyone seeking enlightenment, but then western philosophy in its use of the term meditation is surely not … Continue reading I Wish I did not Have to Endure the Words formed by so many Insipid Graduates of Universities who Continue to imagine that They must Be the First to Have Ever Thought What They Think because No One Had Smart Phones or the Internet as It is Today, Then . . . in That Time Before [Flash Fiction]

I love being at the ocean. I love watching the ocean seawater waves coming to shore one after another and another with nothing petty about their movement, their rising, swelling, turning, curling falling all of a sudden in a thunderous crash, and all over again and again, the silver sinuosity of the eavelet caps out … Continue reading Reading Juan Ramon Jimenez by the Sea [Flash Fiction]

I am skimming pebbles on the surface of Onota Lake in Pittsfield. It is the summer of 1968, July 22. In exactly one year, Apollo 11 will make its way back to earth from the moon. The craters in the moon's surface have been made by meteor collisions. I do not know if it is … Continue reading Skimming Pebbles [Flash Fiction]

A fictional editor of a fictional review writes an "About Us" entry in the review he publishes with the help of no one, himself being the whole of the staff, everything is written by him . . . he asks a friend to read the text of his proposed "About Us" section for the literary … Continue reading How Hamlet’s Advice to the Players is Sound Advice to You and Me

Created equal . . . something I say, I think we understand, I have heard, I know we have said we have wanted this. I sometimes do not remember where I have heard it, that all of us are created equal . . . something I assume I know in the marrow of my bones, … Continue reading Beware the Frost in Early Spring [Flash Fiction]

He died. I don't recall if unexpectedly. We made it to Pittsfield to bury him. I helped carry his casket. I had helped carry the casket of Aunt Mae, of Cousin Michael who had come home in a bag, all of them that summer. Two in June; one in September; I do not recall which … Continue reading How Doubt Has Become the Image of Truth for You, for Me, for Everyone

A man asks a question, Is there a market in America for the literary essay? The man answers his own question with an I doubt it; he then pauses. He thinks about what he has asked, asking himself questions the way he has, the way he has grown accustomed doing while writing essays as he … Continue reading To Be Afraid or not to Be Afraid [Flash Fiction]

He wonders why she has to be the way she is, how she is. She wonders why he has to say what he says, Imagining he says whatever he does, She does, Because it upsets her.

https://youtu.be/Kq2qsAZ1hn0

He is not really a misanthrope, I would say about me in the third-person, if I wanted to speak about me without you thinking it was me saying what I was saying . . . about me; although I think there might still be some of you who imagine him to be one no matter … Continue reading Musings [Flash Fiction]

I have always found Sancerrity better than sincerity. Sitting on the banquet in the corner diagonally across from the entrance under the mirror at right angle to his face and the poster of La Bete Humaine, starring Jean Gabin, he sips a glass of Sancerre, a bottle he has ordered, on the table, not on ice, coming up. … Continue reading Medium, Never Well [a Chap Book of prose poetry]

If I were a spider, my webs would have purpose.

Prologue I remember my days in university. What do I remember from my days in university? Questions made to order, someone said, I heard her say it, I didn't say anything to her about how trite she sounded when she said it. Questions asked, questions formed, what they do to us--to me--when answering is not … Continue reading Banana Tree

A Fictional Essay on the Truths of the Matter   The Real Author I do not understand how we do not understand how gay marriage and abortion rights are related, connected in one notion of human rights, absolute, universal and transcendent (and really, go fuck yourself if you are of the mind to insist that … Continue reading In Some Dictionaries, ‘Martyrdom’ Follows ‘Marriage’ [a Short Story]

A man writes of another man, an unnamed man sitting in a cafe, himself who writes an essay in his journal, an essay we do not get to see entirely, only the excerpts the man who writes of the man who writes the essay allows us to see . . . A man sits at … Continue reading A Man at a Table in a Cafe Sometime Late in the Year 1999 [Flash Fiction]

He writes: Reading Patti Smith's M Train. Got it for Christmas. Was in a biography of T. Williams at the time so did not begin reading it right away. Picked the former here up after the latter was put down (not like horses). Put it down again--much in the way of final revisions for my book,  poetry … Continue reading A Flower of Evil [flash fiction]