Browse Topics
Death
Gambling
A roulette wheel, fraudulent tax returns, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator
December 2006
One Cigarette A Day
We are bouncing over a rough ocean, on a boat packed with twenty or so fishermen, and I am breathing the smoke from my grandfather’s cigarettes. In the darkness of early morning the captain collects money for a gambling pool. “First and heaviest, thirty-seventy split,” he yells, and when he gets to us, my grandfather hands over a fistful of bills. As the captain moves on, my grandfather winks at me and says, “You will win.”
December 2006
First Breath Last Breath
When a baby boy is born / and the midwife / holds him up / as he takes / his first breath, / Place him over / the Mother’s face / so when the baby exhales / his first breath on Earth / the Mother breathes it.
December 2006
Instead Of Dying
The leopard of his imagination pulled down the feathers and blooded flesh of stories fueled by his previous failures and delivered as the result of his recovery. Whereas earlier he’d simply chronicled the deterioration of mostly working-class lives, his new stories actually allowed for recovery and revelation.
December 2006
Burying Angel O’Malley
I had thought that watching them carry Angel out the door for the last time would be the hardest part to bear, but then they picked up the lid and put it over her again, and her father reached into his pocket and pulled out a nail and began to hammer it in. Usually hammering is a good sound.
December 2006
Saddam Hussein Is Writing Poetry In Solitary Confinement
I laughed when I told my friend: / Saddam is writing poems! / No matter how down and out you are, there’s always / poetry! I snorted. / When the last rotten plank / in the basement of your mind has fallen through, / pray that a thin lifeline of words may sustain you.
December 2006November 2006
If terrorism is a threat to democracy, so is errorism: refusing to admit blunders; twisting other people’s words; consistently making statements known to be untrue.
November 2006
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today