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Suicide Six
221 pages
A young man is haunted by the ghost of his best friend after he allows him to drive home drunk and he is killed in an accident. Set in
Excerpt from Suicide Six:
Standing at that door he could see his whole life out ahead of him. He saw his soul traveling through space and time, going from orange-red canyons to celestial forests, stopping at street front cafés and living in all the places he would go—Le Tabac de la Sorbonne in Paris, the square of the Grand Place in Brussels, the fountains of Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy—but in everyplace, location, and destination he would be standing there with a spot that was cut out where Natalie was suppose to have been. He could envision all the people he would know, all of his new friends, the life he would carve out for himself, the joy and the laughter and the wonder of every secret that he had ever known until that second when he would realize that he would be without her for the rest of his life.
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Honey to a Bee
226 pages
A young girl dreams that she can fly to escape the horror of her real life. Set in
Excerpt from Honey To A Bee:
Aveline flew over the woodlands. She looked up at the sky at the clouds and the very deep scared shoulders of the mountains. The colors of autumn were everywhere—yellow, orange, red, maroon—the reflection of the colors floating atop the rivers and streams. The sun grew bright as she passed by along the shore of Arcadia, where their were strands of sugar and yellow maple, pin cherry and tupelo all glistening wet in the morning sun. She could see a roadway as it snaked in and out of the pines, tall stone walls built along the coast, and she could smell the scent of blueberry and wood smoke in the air. Aveline flew higher over the
Aveline suddenly began to fall within her dream—faster, spiraling, tumbling out of the sky. Just as she was about to hit the ground her descent began to slow. She let out a deep breath and her feet gently touched the ground.
She looked around. It felt strange being on land and not in the sky. It wasn’t safe. I want to fly, she thought to herself. I want to be with God. I want to be there with him so I can stop this. She closed her eyes and waited.
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Short Fiction
All Night Forever
12 short stories, including 2 nominated for the storySouth Million Writer’s award, one nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Prize, and one nominated for the 2008 Preditors and Editor’s Reader’s Poll award. The collection includes, The Iraqi Occupation of Osama Hoshyar Allam, Crossing the Sun, and Heart As Big As The Door.
Excerpt from The Iraqi Occupation of Osama Hoshyar Allam:
Of course, Osama Hoshyar Allam never mentioned any of this to his beloved wife. He already knew what Israa thought about all of his thinking. Her red dress represented to him the gift that he had bought for her on their anniversary in
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Excerpt from I'm With Stupid: Alexandra slowly makes her way through the club, going past all the glitterati, people talking, laughing, voices moving across her path, drinks being lifted, the smell of cologne, a thousand eyes watching her every move. She sees several men make eye-contract with her. She smiles each time, but only for a second. She notices the girls in the club, everyone a superstar, bellybuttons laid bare and pierced in every-which-way, tanned perfect backs, tanned perfect breasts, perfect noses, perfect mouths and eyes, but not many dreams in those eyes ...
124 pages
11 short stories, including I'm With Stupid, Spellbound, The Persistence Of Memory, Paradise Island, House Of Spirits, and Slowly Falling In Love With George W. Bush. Stories have appeared in The Oregon Review, Portland Monthly, Brink Magazine, and Dogmatika.
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Poetry
Near Life Experience (2010)
96 pages
Excerpt from Near Life Experience:
There is a veil across this sweet red Bosnian sky tonight,
a light sheen, thin as the wind, something that shouldn’t know me
as well as it does;
oh, there is where our house used to be!
and there is where you and I used to sit under our chestnut tree,
over there is our frozen waterfall—in that blood red spot right
there is where you and I use to sit in our congregation.
And I’m praying with my head in these hands,
and I’m asking God, why?—just like ten million souls
caught in the wars before me;
but the night wind is singing at its hardest, and the maple leaves
are scattering all about; oh, my soul is lost for good now, my old
friend; sailing up on those funeral notes of the horns just giving out.
But keep going, they’ll say, and See what happens like this is only
as odd as the green of the old bathroom door.
And what about tomorrow, and the next day?
No, let us never talk about tomorrow ever again—no, tomorrow
in this world will always be more immense than today.
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Essendo Morti – Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009)
126 pages
Nominated for the 2010
Excerpt from Essendo Morti – Being Dead:
The Hours Happened (9/11)
We drove out of Vendian and out into Ordovician,
The air moist and warm blowing through our hair,
New York City rising in gray vaults off on the horizon,
Abandoned dreams behind us in our rear view mirror,
We stepped all through the hot ash after reaching ground zero,
Leaving only our footprints to prove that we were there,
A part of me couldn’t grasp what had just happened,
You looked at me and said: “Can you describe all of this?”
I looked over at you and I said: “I don’t think I ever can.”
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American Underground (2008)
75 pages
Work from American Underground has been featured in
Excerpt from American Underground:
I retraced her red-quartz steps along the
River
when I thought of her near the Old Bourse,
I fell down and I wept—
I could see God as the sun slowly moved
over her body as she was lying there right
next to me,
her voice speaking as though she were
a colporteur living along the blood roads of
Octavio Paz,
her body smooth like ice, but you had to
touch it.
But now she is gone forever, and I am ready
to receive forgiveness for all of my sins,
put the needle in my veins, and wait for the
spaceship to take me.
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Becoming X (2008)
34 pages
Work in Becoming X has been featured in Identity Theory, Dogmatika,
Excerpt from Becoming X:
I love the shabbiness of the
boulevards of the Arab world,
That strange sadness that hangs
over the slums in the late evening,
You can sense the urban decay
that is anything but Western,
A hatred of a “them” that is stronger
than a love of “themselves,”
Humiliated little boys caught
between tradition and modernity,
Boys who seek out great towers
that are as tall as they are small,
Like governments that use modernity
to keep their races in place.
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
Amen.
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You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (2007)
27 pages
Work in You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers has been featured in The Aurora Review, Drunk & Lonely Men Journal,
Excerpt from You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers, originally featured in Fieldstone Review:
You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers
I dreamed a hole through her head, where blue
cathoray spilled out over space and time,
ten seconds of my stare, my eyes pretending to look
at the red Coca-Cola sign flashing up behind her head
as it went blinking on and off: Drink Coke! You dope!
People say we are like Siamese twins, but really
we are more like
six murdered sextuplets on a Sunday;
You’re crazy. We can’t be together, she says every
time we go and remarry down in brilliant old
I love the crazy flashing skies over
emerald stain the way old George Stevens got to
do it,
both of us with bare feet, dancing under moonlight,
over broken bottles of glass, arms flailing, waving madly;
every day another séance to stop the Nuclear bombs,
all night long as we pray against the missiles landing
on someone else—wet and on fire;
a wave, ten thousand surfers going out from the storm
atop another tsunami; I can taste it! I can bury it in the
morning with my foot down to the floorboard;
water, napalm, flying about; I will fly; sea turtles flowing
in my veins to the other side of the earth; my mouth: it’s
got a direct line to Jehovah’s red ear, splitting my own
chest open to get down to the delta;
swinging, dancing, spinning, tango atop the cobblestones,
both of us shivering along the gold spires, our souls being
pushed up hard against doors, in heavenly colors, azure-blue,
emerald, until we are falling—
down to the ghost of your words as they whisper out to me:
“Come together; fall apart.”
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Jazz (2006)
64 pages
Work in Jazz has been featured on NPR, The Providence Journal, Columbia Review, Juked, Gutter Eloquence Magazine, The Arava Review, Pedestal Magazine, Baker’s Dozen Review, Bryant Literary Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Contemporary American Voices, Boxcar Poetry Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, Gander Press Review, Chaffey Review, Poetic Legacy, BlazeVox, and others.
Excerpt from Jazz:
The ghosts sail out from the
Breachway every night at dusk,
the wind filling their sails, shadow filled,
all these tiny pewter disks shining atop the
waves,
and sometimes you can hear them saying:
I just want to go home;
and they sail out into the Great Salt Pond
into the middle of
parking is always free;
where all our familiar dreams go on vacation;
and when you’re ready maybe you’ll go there
too;
out into the mystery of happiness—
you and God in a perfect place,
out into this little secret that lasts no longer
than a second:
never desire anything.
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Mad Season (2003)
60 pages
Work in Mad Season has been featured in Poetic Legacy, Chanterelle’s Notebook, Arabesques Magazine, Dogmatika, Litchfield Literary Review, Outsider’s Ink, Pedestal Magazine, and Underground Window.
Excerpt from Mad Season:
I was hoping you would know better,
but you acted like an animal,
eating two fifty-ounce steaks and then dessert,
and when we found you your name was
already missing from the credits,
well, we watched as you trounced
through the neighbor’s garden like a tiger,
you got drunk and raped that girl,
you were cursing and swearing about how great you were,
and then you pulled out your gun¾
and what could anyone say to you?
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In The Garden of Arcane Delights (2000)
74 pages
Excerpt from In The Garden of Arcane Delights:
I could see you all the way across the smoky bar,
sitting there not far from where Papa Hemingway
used to sit on his barstool, dreaming of his lions all
the way through 1929.
What was it that I saw in your bright green eyes?—something
in me that made me forget that I was a broken man.
Through the hazy smoke and bad Jimmy Buffet
playing on stage, we smiled and told each other
where we were from.
You said:
I said:
Right then I had this feeling:
we should dance to some Rocky Burnette rockabilly;
go running naked through the
maybe hitch a ride back in time atop Apollo 14: yeah, baby, you better
only wear your cowboy hat!
And when we sat down and talked to each other for the rest of
the night—wow! you made me forget about everything bad in
this made up chaotic world:
that idiot George W. Bush, and the price I paid for oil yesterday;
all those red and orange and yellow terror alerts putting me on
the fritz,
Global Warming, Al Gore, and death; and, oh, yeah: John Grisham
writing another novel: oh, no, not that again please!
And out of the blue right then you said to me: “That’s why God
made
Wow! What could I say? I couldn’t say anything. I only knew
that I would be forever falling in love with you; and you
just nodded your head like you already knew this too.
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79 Degree Probably of Loss (1995)
70 pages
Work in 79 Degree Probably of Loss has been featured in Newport Review, Cortland Review, Hawaii Review, Mid-South Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Rose & Thorn Literary eZine, Arts and Understanding Magazine, Parlor Lit Magazine, Pinehurst Journal, Dog River Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Underground Window, O!!Zone, Munyori Poetry Journal, Nexus, Haunts, Outsider’s Ink, Votobia’s Anthology of American Writers, Scorched Earth, Plain Spoke Journal, Perpetual Magazine, and others.
Excerpt from 79 Degree Probably of Loss:
What beautiful death there is in Madonna de Campiglio,
the peasant people frozen in ice in dance,
the slopes of
another place you must come, one more dream to put your trust in,
and you can’t believe you’ll ever do it again,
swimming in the light and shadows where you’ve drowned,
the gum arabic and green volatilize of valle Verzascaa—
the river where you saw the diver from
the way you held his girl friend, the river from the glacier,
minion and nonpareil, crystalline, his body preserved,
Russian experiment in the stone houses of Sonogno,
the ache in my body as you ease yourself against me,
the way your legs cower out, the ecstasy in your pain,
in the white under your flesh in your bones,
the risk, the knife of your spine,
and I take it, twist and turn and bludgeon it,
and the body moves, consumes all of me, and you give in,
and you die in a way too, so cold here in the Dolomites,
always writing by candlelight, the bathroom out in the hallway,
and dance without music—
the sound of your hands against the piano back in the states.
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Hemispheres (1994)
25 pages
Excerpt from Hemispheres:
After years in
rain-bands drifting up north to
ten thousand days in the monotonous green flat
of
taking my family and driving them south,
as south as one can go in the lower forty eight,
where road ends and life begins,
the southernmost point—
at the edge of the sea’s shaking helmet, Key West,
where your dreams still swim beneath the water
with the rock hind and juv fish.
A place where you can see
hurricanes floating up as far north as the Sigsbee Knolls,
up over land into the
past the stars one hundred billion years away,
blue supergiants collapsing to neutron stars,
our heads emptying, calmness flowing, blue, down our throats,
peace coming, euphoria, something none of us have ever felt before,
in the north, on the plains, in the mountains,
skies full of thunder, that picture of father we had put on his grave,
that feeling of losing our sense of place
the reason why we all leave it sometimes—
all those dry silos full of yesterday’s dreams.
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Kindle for the Book Burning (1989)
64 pages
Work from Kindle for the Book Burning has been featured in Silent Actor, Hawaii Review, Poems Niederngasse, Mid-South Review, Pinehurst Journal, Shawnee Silhouette, Whole Notes Magazine, Dog River Review, Outsider’s Ink, Haunts, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and others. Additionally, the poem Kindle for the Book Burning was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the Rose & Thorn Literary eZine.
Excerpt from Kindle for the Book Burning:
At the Kingston Station, we stood on the edge of the platform,
the rain beating racist (black) against our raincoats.
He turned and looked at me:
“Isn’t there anything that offends you?”
I stood there and thought about the children men sodomize,
their mothers who we freely allow to be killed,
the bombs and silos that have become a part
of the collective subconscious of the human condition.
...And I looked over at him,
and I saw the train coming in his eyes:
“No, dad,” I said. “Only that we must die.”
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