Close Calls

On bad days I watch CCTV footage of car wrecks
and unscathed drivers walking away. Babies falling off tables
and getting caught. I haven’t written in a while. I’ve been busy.

I haven’t written in a while to set myself down in obsolescence
and endure. Coffee brings our the brute in me, booze
puts a damp hand on my eyelids and pushes gently down, down.

[… continue reading “Close Calls” at Stirring.]

Sweet Land

Everything’s coming up oranges.
“Ollie Ollie in come free,”
it’s all the statue can do to whisper.
Meanwhile, cats prowl the edges of wildfires,
eagles abandon their towers—
dropping knee pads and hats on an underclad country.

And the FLOTUS floats above this great country,
in gowns that will never be orange.
The handmaids watch as she enters the tower,
as children and chickens roam free—
cage to cage, scratching like matches that can never light fires.
Voices fall in the Capital, to lisps and backside whispers.

When I say wiretaps, I mean the kind that hears horses whisper—
even assholes have assholes to let out the gas. Imagine a country
where they do not. Which begs the question of who fires
first. Which begs the answer. Armpits or oranges?
Imagine the speed of a sea turtle freed
from a six-pack ring that once held Dos Equis. Up to the seaweed tower!

[… continue reading “Sweet Land” at Scoundrel Time.]

The Conditional Joke, a Tool for Fiction Writers

Here’s a joke from the 4th or 5th century, CE: Shopping for windows, a Kymean asks if there are any that look south.

Here’s a joke I heard two years ago, at my MFA program: What’s the difference between a poet and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family.

These jokes are conditional jokes. That is, they’re jokes which work when listeners have the information necessary to get the point. They have something else in common: in both instances, the conditional information is supplied by the joke itself. I have no doubt that readers understood the jokes even if they came to this essay ignorant of the way the ancient world stereotyped Kymeans and unaware of the presumed impecuniousness of poets. Conditional jokes can educate, and that means that they can be used as exposition.

Done badly, exposition can interrupt a story with a lecture, change the narrative distance, or force characters into artificial behavior—reminiscing where reminiscence isn’t called for or telling people things they already know. Jokes avoid those pitfalls. They engage readers because they’re lively, short, and have unexpected endings. They don’t distort character behavior or change narrative distance, because all kinds of people—all kinds of characters—engage with jokes as tellers and listeners.

[… continue reading at Fiction Writers Review.]

The Day After Christmas

One icy night, seven years after his return from as far away as he’d ever been, just south of Bologna, ready to penetrate the Axis’ last major defensive line of the campaign, Frank walked into the extra bedroom upstairs on Union Road and heard one hundred head of cattle lowing. He flipped on the light and thirty donkeys began braying, while the bleating of two hundred sheep rolled across the room. At his next heavy step, the shrieks and wails of thirty awakening babies found their places in the surrounding sound waves. Frank stood stunned by the sounds, then backed up slowly until he had left the room. They’d turned on him for some reason, he thought.

[… continue reading “The Day After Christmas” at New Letters Magazine.]