At the first meeting of a fiction workshop
with Lydia Davis, one of the students asked her if
she believed a short story could consist of three
sentences or fewer.  Lydia said, “Yes, I do.” He
nodded, stood up and without a word walked out
of the classroom and never came back.  We all wondered if something happened to him.

	
	Fact or fiction?


 
Dark comes early in the mountains. They were climbing up there, bushwhacking as they went. Their headlamps cutting zig zag patterns
into the night. Gladys gave me a corkscrew once.
She insisted, “You never know when you might need of those. Tonight, was one of those nights.
 
In the wake of the storm, the night was charged by downed electrical wires. The streets sparked and the few remaining trees ignited shooting fingers of flame along the branches. The air smelled wet and feral, alive like an animal no one had known of before.

 
	
536-

Tour Concentration Camp   Erased

	I have carried
The United States          the gas chambers of Auschwitz
A splendid visit

		small white-		wood oblong
mausoleum			   white oven knobs

				       switched off
lights.  Darkness killed as much as the gas.

		I went in

					Right away I
   Attempted to escape
			Hid in a niche
I veered
the crowd climbed			, doubly mourning
yesterday’s anguish

				everyone joined in a sad
funereal picnic

		Helene Cixous
 
538-

Random. Boring Post Cards. Phaidon.
Atomic Post Cards. The Lochgelly
Centre Complex or SAC Headquarters
Offert Air Force Base. White Rock Los
Alamos County or Actual Pictures of
Dreaded Bomb Blasts. Frenchman’s Flats,
Nevada. Convalescent Home Broadstairs.
Looking Across Solway Firth, Silloth
(With coffee ring stain) The City of the
Atomic Bomb: Cedar Hill Elementary School
Oak Ridge Tennessee. Dead Men Reading
Post Cards.
 
558-

Dream on with Joseph Cornell

The Parkway Dream. Utopia that is.
Film strips. And air guitars. Monsters
in a Box. Neither black nor white.
Gray. Domestic tableau. Not an 
American Tragedy. My Brother’s
Keeper. Dreams of old toys. Broken
music boxes. Jack (s) in. Scrapbooks.
Vandalized, 1906 Sears Catalog.
When is a Franklin Stove not a Franklin
Stove. When the canary from the coal
mine escapes. Sings. Like a jailbird.
Vonnegut. Shoeless Joe. All those
boxes filled. Many times, over.
		


561-

Back List Book Titles Arranged: a found poem

If Night Is Falling. The Moon Rises
in the Rattlesnake’s Mouth. Night Farming
in Bosnia. Weightless Earth. Carbon Dating
Hunger. Infinite Days Teaching Bones to Fly.
Travel Over Water. The Sky’s Dustbin. Light
from a Small Brown Bird. Blue Swan, Black
Swan. Kissing the Bee. Painting the Egret’s Echo. 
Reembrace of Water. Ancient Maps and a Tarot
Pack. All the Beautiful Dead. Bitter Oleander.


		562-

The perfect fiction is reality.
(Life). Gilbert Sorrentino asserted.
In a book of poems.  A day book.
Of sorts. Perfect fictions. All. 
A deck of 52 involved. Not 
necessarily playing Cards. Weeks.
Are. Not in an Orangery for sure.
That book with the word orange
embedded within. Not a rhyming 
Simon, he. El Gilberto. Le gran 
orange. Trusty Rusty. Not the poet.
The ball player, “Everything invented
is real.” Flaubert.