White antlers of the night exacerbate my soul. There were gerbils at angles unheard of, perpendicular to themselves. These gerbils: my little sister in her prom dress more expensive than mine. This was in Cleveland. And so on. And so on. This is the kind of thing they mostly print these days, desperate attempts to […]
During the afternoon of my 21st birthday, I was standing by the garden along one side of our house with my father, Walter McCollum. We were looking at the peony buds as they prepared to bloom into great globes of cream and magenta. The sepals were alive with black ants. “Those *%*)(#! ants!” my father
Mother *%*)(#! Tongue Read More »
The dying stare beyond you into some other world when you look into their eyes. They gaze intently beyond your care, your grief, beyond your dream. Tonight, you stare up toward where my friend sang his last song, silenced as he was. He’d been gone a day, and where you look now, a bird sang,
The Stare of the Dying (for Richard and Sophie) Read More »
Late summer had toasted the grass and weeds, But in the field I found a dandelion ghost, A perfectly spherical puffball of a hundred seeds. I pinched it off and huffed and watched the seeds coast On the random eddies, out, out from my breath Over the exhausted field, like paratroops let from a plane
“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life!” – Max Shulman, *Sleep ‘Til Noon* Shulman’s parody of Mickey Spillane’s tougher than tough guy style probably represents what most people thought of “detective stories” when I was young. They were considered one of
Low Tastes I – John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee Read More »
In Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, that ship’s crew finally rebels over its working conditions, in particular over the food they’re given. They haul a side of beef, writhing with maggots, before the ship’s doctor: “Dr. Smirnov’s eye peering through the doubled pince-nez fills the screen. (Cut to . . . ) “White maggots swarm
These Are Not Maggots: A Self-Help Manual for the Tenuously Still-Employed Read More »