SHORT STORIES
Totem
You cannot wake the dead, but you can disturb their sleep.
Totem was published in Solstice Literary Magazine, a Boston-based international literary journal, where it was described as a “mythic probing into Native American history.” It was based on a journey I took with my friend Spencer Beebe, who runs one of America’s great environmental organization, Ecotrust, to search for spirit bear, an encounter with many kinds of spirits.
Winds
“I don’t know,” he says. The words sneak between the sounds of the wind and the surf and linger around his head, even as the smoke of his cigar dissipates.
Winds was published in the online literary journal Toasted Cheese, as an Editor’s Pick. It’s hard for a man to escape himself, even under a Caribbean moon.
No More, No Less.
He had arrived at the age where men are most vulnerable to folly. The alternative was sadness.
This short story was the cover story for Vol. XIX, 2010, of Downstate Story Magazine. DSM publisher Elaine Hopkins recently was quoted as saying that “No More, No Less” is “good enough to be in The New Yorker.”
POETRY
The Moonlight was a Glitch
Moonlight softened the bathroom counter yellow, and bathed the shampoo streaks that sprang to sight like mushrooms in dank and spongy soil. Caressed the toothbrush like wild night fern the creams and ointments, each separate genus given life by this unexpected glitch of half-completed neon light.
Not the flat casket glare that cast its dead look longing over the toilet top, along the shower curtain rod, blunt creeping into all of it, but something about a ballast and a circuit, her understanding dimmed like the light itself, it halted its process, yielding something gentler, perhaps, with hope, it always lay within, night’s soft shade of kindliness that must love you for it makes you beautiful.
When she knew what she had she turned sideways and saw her dreamtime face and a smile that spoke of wisdom. Then CLICK the light blustered full and in its shine, her face, scrubbed of reminiscence, much as she always saw it.
Download The Moonlight was a Glitch [PDF] This poem was published in Fall 2010, Volume 4.2 of Straylight Literary Arts Magazine, the literary magazine of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.
The Palestinian Boy
He is a child of three thousand years born before the time of maps. He is the intersection of the Brits, the propulsion of the Germans. He is the deadly solo missile of cynics across borders He is the memory that does not seek tomorrow.
He is the failure of all who claim to lead him. He springs from states that neither see nor understand him sired and desired amidst their endless walls. He is bred to throw, armed to catch.
And as he encases himself as he walks across the street as he gets on the bus as he sits among the children
And as we watch in horror and scream to him and god to stop
And as he pulls the handle for all the worlds that war within him His conscience is clear he will enter every good man’s heaven to be reborn
unless we learn to love him
Moisture
The twinkling glaze over morning fields The wintry haze shrouding bedroom windows, a reminder of our own night’s endless breath. The aromatic wave of honeydew and wine. The leavener of heated rooms and day-old bread. The friend to mist and intercourse Conferring space for our own mysteries. It warms our hands, cools our brow, And raises our smallest prayers to heaven.