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Marriage
Fiction
The Stew
She began cooking the stew at 5:41 A.M. on Thursday. Somewhere in the night her husband had, as was his habit, moved to the middle of the bed, and she’d found herself precariously perched between his chest and the edge of the mattress, the inhabitant of an inconsequential strip of bedding that had, over the past few years, become her home.
October 2010
Readers Write
The Last Word
A pair of rainbow-striped socks, a cassette tape, the San Francisco Marathon
August 2010
Poetry
What About God
The rabbi is coming to talk about the wedding. We lay out cookies, tamari almonds, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, crackers, and strips of sweet red peppers.
June 2010
Poetry
Love Poem
I hear cooing and scuffling as I stand on the steps of my building / and at first, with the fluttering, hope for an angel, a visitation, but / then realize I am listening to pigeons, crammed in a window box, / mating over my head.
April 2010Poetry
hank
hank fell stepping off an escalator at rockefeller center and banged his head up good/ spent the next ten days in roosevelt hospital/ crankily submitting to every test
February 2010Readers Write
Narrow Escapes
A noodle shop in central Burma, The Phil Donahue Show, the Tet Offensive
January 2010
Readers Write
The Middle Of Nowhere
Scuba diving, a Mickey Mouse watch, half a loaf of warm bread
September 2009
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Classified Ad
The Sumner Press, the weekly paper from my hometown in southeastern Illinois, continues to arrive in my mailbox in Ohio even though I’m not a subscriber. A few years ago, when my wife and I were the grand marshals for the Sumner fall-festival parade, the publisher gave us a complimentary one-year subscription. The subscription has run out, but the paper keeps coming, as if a higher power has decided I need it in my life.
September 2009
Fiction
A New Painting Of Marianne
I wasn’t my idea to call Marianne. I hadn’t talked to her since she’d shown up drunk on our porch one summer night and tried to kiss me in front of my wife. That was four years earlier, just before Jenny and I had moved from Phoenix to Tucson. Now we were back in Phoenix and looking to buy a house.
May 2009
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