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{ Category Archives } featured writers

Excellent, previously published writes. Some famous, some who should be.

Notes for Notes to Nothing

I write a lot into the Twitter text box. The I edit, select, cut, cut again, print out, cut up, lay about, arrange, rearrange, randomize, assemble, and reassemble the thought shards in to longer pieces, for reading out and collecting into a pocket book I’m working on, tentatively called Notes to Nothing. These are edited [...]

Toenails, Jorge Luis Borges

Soft stockings coddle them by day and nail-bossed leather shoes buttress them, but my toes refuse to pay attention. Nothing interests them but emitting toenails, horny plates, semi-transparent and elastic, to defend themselves–from whom? Stupid and mistrustful as they alone can be, they never for a moment stop readying that tenuous armament. They reject the [...]

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XYLOMANCY, Scott Zieher

Oh didn’t we dance a puzzle Round the tree when we Danced the way we did In early April when all is Vernal and we needed twigs to Invoke the gods that hovered Near a healthy sprig About a foot or so longer Than needed to produce an Invocation that requires wood Or a cross [...]

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Dream Song #14 by John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am [...]

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Franz Kafka, Before The Law

BEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. “It is possible,” says the [...]

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Bill Knott, Comic Poems

from The Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999 – BUY THE BOOK . LEDGELIFE The taller the monument, the more impatient our luggage. Look, look, a graveyard has fancy dirt. Historians agree: this is the pebble which beaned Goliath. Every billboard is theoretically as beautiful as what lies unseen behind [...]

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Bill Knott, poems from The Quicken Tree

. CHRISTMAS AT THE ORPHANAGE But if they’d give us toys and twice the stuff most parents splurge on the average kid, orphans, I submit, need more than enough; in fact, stacks wrapped with our names nearly hid the tree: these sparkling allotments yearly guaranteed a lack of–what?–family?– I knew exactly what it was I [...]

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Bill Knott, poems from Becos

FEEDING THE SUN One day we notice that the sun needs feeding. Immediately a crash program begins: we fill rockets with wheat, smoke-rings, razorblades, then, after long aiming –they’re off. Hulls specially alloyed so as not to melt before the stuff gets delivered we pour cattle rivers windmills, aborigines etcet into the sun which however, [...]

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The Family Monkey, Russell Edson

The Family Monkey We bought an electric monkey, experimenting rather recklessly with funds carefully gathered since grandfather’s time for the purchase of a steam monkey. We had either, by this time, the choice of an electric or gas monkey. The steam monkey is no longer being made, said the monkey merchant. But the family always [...]

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