oh fine. just fine.

Let’s tamper with the language. Let’s make up new words and keep using them and spreading them until they become part of the lexicon. Let’s force feed teenagers on street corners our esoteric spellings so that they look up from their tablets/iPhones/Androids and still their fingers for an instant and say, ‘For real?’ Let’s campaign against any politician, regardless of dogma, who misuses words, even one time. Our demands: Don’t mangle what is beautiful. Shut your pie hole if you can’t speak coherently. We will be the one-eyed men in the land of the blind, the sooth-sayers, and the scriveners. We will stand up at the dais during testimonial dinners and let fly with poems. People will dance to our words. We will restore language to its rightful place as a conveyance for wisdom and passion. Supreme Court justices will write clearly, for they will fear our wrath. No word will ever be considered ‘dirty’ unless it is mangled by those who should know better. Sta

At House of Writers annual gathering, we write non-stop for five days. Now and then, I hit a wall.    A sex scene is difficult to write well. Most, if not all, nouns and verbs are old hat. That leaves adjectives and adverbs, and face it, who hasn't  already  run through wet, hard, purple, swollen, throbbing, aching, blushing (all gerunds), softly, vigorously, meltingly, brutally, shyly, patiently, expertly, rosy, misty, erect, tight, slippery and simultaneously -- ad nauseam.     Even the grande dame of erotic description, Anne Rice, started to repeat herself by the third book in her  way-hot  dominance-submission “Sleeping Beauty” trilogy.     No, I have nothing new to add to the boy-on-boy, girl-on-girl, boy-girl, girl-girl-boy, boy-boy-girl, boy-in-closet watches girl,  boy in swimming pool discovers jets,  older girl at boarding school comforts new arrival while other girls look on,  post-feminist female professor 'tutors' fraternity boys in private,  submissi

This first appeared on Fictionaut T hey leave their marks like fingerprints, these amyloid plaques . When the doctor said the words, I heard Amy-Lloyd Plax, hyphenated, like the architect: Frank-Lloyd Wright.  "Dr. and Mrs. Lloyd Plax invite you to the wedding of their daughter Amy," I giggled in the examining room. Those rusty finger print shapes, they form a blackout curtain between me and yesterday -- the CSI tv show plot or my breakfast choices. They form a wall between now and everything that happened before or in another place. People say there's  nothing  wrong with me, that I'm still sharp. A friend reads a story I wrote over the weekend and says it isn't possible that I'm going downhill.  That's because she doesn't see the fury of my effort to find a word among the tangles and pull it out. I go through long silent struggles to recall names that used to bubble up irrepressibly. It took 90 seconds to recall "irrepressibly."

This first appeared on Fictionaut. Cicada sleeps for seven years, a curled and brittle pupa in the soil. He stirs and digs his way toward the light. All those years, he thinks, for just one chance to fuck. I hope she's pretty.   He climbs a tree and lures a female with his song. Reeee-ee! Reee-ee ! Later, the two engage in pillow talk.   “Why can't we be like crickets or mosquitoes? Why such a long gestation? It's not efficient.” They sit a while, clinging to bark or branch. He rubs his legs against his abdomen, hoping for one more hump before his time is up. She busies herself, laying her eggs in holes around the tree. Poor kids, she thinks. Our kind are most unfortunate. We never get to meet our moms and dads.  If only we could speed the process up. And then she dies. The gods are busy, but they hear her prayers. Even the small cicada's hopes get noticed. “What do you think, do we change the schedule?” asks Jehovah. Shiva an

          It is my mother's fault that I kill for a living.     She was a gun for hire, and she taught me to shoot at the age when other girls were learning to groom their Barbies. My Barbies were used for target practice. Mother was a cool drink of water, fair-skinned and regal in posture. She could wear a Balenciaga gown to an embassy party and have every man-jack falling all over himself to pull out her chair. The night she assassinated the German deputy chancellor, she was wearing Dior (the gown and the perfume), and no one had the first inkling that there was a silencer and pistol with .22 hollow points in her beaded evening bag.      I think she decided to train me when she realized that one child was all she would ever have. But what cinched it was that, at age seven, I was already destined to be an unremarkable-looking person.      With average coloring, height, weight and disposition, I was someone who would always go unnoticed in a crowd. I was the perf

First posted on Fictionaut.   You parked your father's Nash Rambler down a dark lane but left the engine running and the heater on. December had fallen over the city, all snow and icy glitter. We peeled off coats and scarves, and you let the seats back. Nash was the first to make reclining seats,  and never mind all the other claptrap about tilted steering wheel or extra trunk space. With those seats that folded back into a bed, you were the makeout king of Montreal. And I was your queen.      You started with slow, soft, desultory kisses on my neck and ears, wandering every which way, no direction known. Then I did the same to you, inhaling your scent which was one thing at your hairline and another at your collarbone. It was all light touching and heavy breathing My mouth arrived at the side of yours and paused there, not wanting to give you the full-on, actual kiss just yet.  Then we moved by millimeters, so, so slowly until our lips were aligned on top of each other&#

This story first appeared in The Lascaux Review in 2017      Whenever someone asks me, “So, what do you do?” I like to say, “I am a crash test dummy tech for the National Highway Traffic Safety folks.”      I throw in the word “folks” so that I sound likable and easy-going. Then I say, “I am the one who pulls the dummies out of the cars and measures the indentations in their heads and collarbones, you know, where the seat belt pulls. It's like an autopsy.”      None of this is true, of course, but you would be amazed at how much respect people give me. Naturally, the next question is, “So, which car is the safest?”       I can see they are hoping I will name their car. Usually, though, I like to answer, “The 1989 Lincoln Town Car -- Cartier Edition -- set the bar, and nothing's compared since. But last year's BMW 5 series was a real trooper, and this year's Ford F 250 is just terrific. ”       This is spoken with solemnity, as though the crash test dum

     An Eastern towhee scratches in the pine straw beneath my window. It has the black face and rufous breast of an adult male but the timidity of a juvenile. His song, “drink your-tea,” lacks confidence.       Frankly, I am surprised the local mockingbird hasn’t run him off. Our mocker, lord of lords and capo di capi in these parts, has scared away migrating robins, a bachelor pair of blue jays and even a loudmouth crow.      I want the gentle towhee to stay and eventually to call a mate to the dense holly hedge outside my office where they will build a nest low to the ground and take turns feeding their young. There is something about his work ethic that draws me to him. He pulls back the fallen leaves with a quick backward jump and delves into the moist topsoil for bugs and seeds.  Over and over he works the yard for sustenance.          His industriousness reminds me that stories and poems won't write themselves. I put aside the novel by someone else and the desire to

This story appeared  in 2018 in Flash Fiction, Flash Memory Published by Anchala Studios.  Breau rolled in after midnight, stinking under the arms and covered in clay. He’d capsized the four-wheeler in a ditch to avoid hitting a deer, he said . More likely he’d fallen asleep drunk and woke up in six inches of filthy water. I told him to whoa right there in the laundry room and strip. He showered with his ball cap still on, gripping the shower nozzle with one hand and soaping his body with the other. Breau liked the red wine, creature comforts, boiled shrimp and moonlight on the bayou, in that order. He loved his babies and me, and he always came home, no matter how late or how flavored his blood was with alcohol. When the circuit judge of Feliciana Parish took away his driver’s license for the final time, Breau just bought a Yamaha 4-wheeler and drove off-road between home and Ti-Louis’ roadhouse and the lumber yard left to him by his drunk of a Daddy. When he flipped the Yamah

A Brief Conversation with a Man Who Fell Off a Cliff He said he was surprised how little time it took to hit the ground.  He thought it would take longer,  that he'd have time to see the purple swallows nested in the crags. I asked him where he hurt and he said everywhere, seeing as he'd landed not on sand but on a rock outcropping. They are so brave, he said, right before he died,  indicating with his eyes the nests built on the sheer and Jagged stone, cosseting their eggs Until the wind.

The Counter Where Names Go to Die On Ellis Island, 1912, arriving immigrants await their turns. White-coated men tell them to cough, peer into their eyes, take their urgent pulses. At one counter stands a middle aged, thin-soled man whose job it is to give people their new American identities. He changes their foreign-sounding names to more American-sounding ones. He doesn't hear the music in “Delaprovatti,” nor the rhythmic susurration in “Sipsizimani.”  Paderewski becomes Drew; Ystremskaya becomes Strong; Wjohowicz becomes Howard. The immigrants -- so malleable -- will do anything to become Americans. They accept this indignity -- which is far less onerous than many they have suffered in the past -- for the sake of getting permission to begin new lives.  This man does his job efficiently and rotely. It doesn't matter to him that people have a right to their names as part of a long blood line stretching back thousands of years. To him they are just sounds —

Falling Man My Pa, a riveter by trade, died building the Golden Gate Bridge. On Feb. 17, 1937, his work scaffold collapsed. They had stretched a safety net under the floor of the bridge from end to end, but it was only capable of catching men and lightweight tools. It had saved 19 men from a cold drowning. Those lucky ones, they laughed and called themselves the “Halfway to Hell” club. But my Pa's scaffold was too heavy, and it broke clean through the net, carrying him and ten others down into the freezing, salty strait. Three months later, when they opened the bridge to pedestrian traffic, my mother put on her Easter bonnet and best shoes and took us kids to walk “that bridge.” All the Golden Gate widows were given a place of honor beside the mayor on a platform, and in the warm spring sunshine with a cheering crowd, the bridge boss, Smiling Joe Strauss, called out the names of the men who had died “giving California this greatest of gifts.” We walked the bridge,