Category Archives: Great Stories Online

Poetry by Thom Adams: “eternal questions for a birthday bash”

I first encountered the writer Thom Adams when I critiqued his philosophical poem “Entropy Road” for the Winning Writers newsletter in 2008. He recently shared some other poems with me, one of which moved me so much that I asked to reprint it here. (Trigger warning for suicide.) Visit Thom’s website for more verse, both serious and light, and articles on contemporary issues.

eternal questions for a birthday bash

who walked those final steps with you,
or danced your darkest hour?
who steadied you or tied your knot;
did you grimly smile, or weep
when the rope went taut?

what moment tipped the balance
of your dire choice?
yesterday, when you looked
happy as you bathed our only child,
or later when your words and eyes assured me
that you trusted… but you lied?

when did the painful reality occur
that no longer is no more and forever,
and latent regrets are not nearly enough?
wasn’t the love you felt for your suckling baby
enough testimony to us mortals
that god lives, but only for the living?

where did your magic meet its pleasant rest?
on a windy breeze that never stops,
or in a flash of light that seared memory clean,
or in a tiny box of lead?
or, does it spread and blend your lovely scent
in a contented whiff of… universal swirl?

why not just live life’s ups and ills
as if choices weren’t limited but that you
   had been cheated?
while others said their jealous prayers
with hopes of only being as lucky.
did your fearless conspirators fan their
   scary flames?
did demons laugh, or cross their fingers toward
   your twisted end?

how is it for you today… considering our son
   turns three?
but pees and wakes me in tortured sweat,
buries watered eyes and sobs till hurt subsists.
how nice to think of mama’s touch, yet feel only
   daddy’s calloused grip.
while he waits to watch the window’s evening
   strollers,
knowing the “what might have been” will never
   be…. for him.

MUST I ask again… or has your tidy damage also
   done you in?
is there something better nothing worse than live?
is something gained or lost again?
was it a silent whimper, or a screaming grin?
can you tell me why or what’s at stake?

… as I light three little candles on love’s birthday cake.

A Faith That Makes Space for Mourning

Just this morning in church I was thinking about the Middle Ages, how their artwork was full of death, real death with grinning skulls and rotting flesh, and how this is considered the era in Western history when Christian belief was most alive and all-pervasive. How many of us who walked through the door this morning literally believe the words on the banner over our heads: “Christ is Risen”? Do I believe it? And by “literally” I mean “in a way that robs death of its power”. For me that also means “historically true”. For you it may not. But either way, that’s the job that “Christ is Risen” has to do.

I’m reading this absorbing, brilliant, painful novel called Swimming, by Nicola Keegan, which I found through this excerpt in Narrative Magazine. It’s about an Olympic gold medalist swimmer whose competitive drive is fundamentally an escape from her oppressive consciousness of death, triggered by family losses in her childhood and her mother’s subsequent spiral into housebound depression. Replace swimming with academic achievement and you have my life story. As I near the book’s end, I keep wondering why the heroine is proceeding down the very modern track of turning to therapy rather than religion when talent fails her and she has to face her long-buried feelings. Unlike my largely secular childhood, this fictional girl was immersed in Midwestern Catholic-school culture and has great respect and affection for the nuns who mentored her. Yet that framework proves powerless to help her or her family surmount their despair when confronted with mortality. Why?

Maybe it’s because modern Christianity doesn’t depict death enough. The church doesn’t spend enough time on the shadow side, allowing sorrow and pain to have their say, not prematurely silenced by happy endings. (If I ran the world, I’d have a second Lent halfway through Pentecost. Do we really need 29 weeks of ordinary time, people?) Those who are still angry and grieving may feel that the only way to validate their feelings is to reject the faith.

Later today I found some of these sentiments echoed in Robert Gross’s paranormal gay romance story “Dark Lapis“, published in the online journal Wilde Oats. Reiter’s Block readers may recall his poem “Poor Souls” reprinted here last month. The plague that passes through his fictional Renaissance city is reminiscent of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s-1990s, and the younger generation’s tendency to dismiss it as old history even though new infection rates remain high. It also reminded me of post-9/11 New York City and the shallow slogans (“Fight back! Go shopping!”) that were supposed to return a stricken populace to business as usual.

From “Dark Lapis”:

…The city was returning to its weddings and babies, lawsuits and public executions, and the anomalies were generally spoken of with a sigh, a shake of the head, a pious reference to the long-term costs of the pestilence, and an abrupt change of topic. But Magnus was drawn to anomalies. Though he would not admit it to anyone, he distrusted the return of the city to normalcy just as much as he was horrified by the return of spring. He preferred the fog, the darkness, the lapis lazuli ring on his finger. The incised griffin turned inward toward his palm, caressed with a thumb.

The cruel fact was Magnus missed the pestilence. He could scarcely contemplate the immensity of this truth to himself, nor could he communicate it to others. To think of it was like holding a hot poker to your flesh, but there it was-the truth-and it rarely left him. Not that he was anything like the mad monks who raved on the street corners at the height of the pestilence, relishing how the Scourge of God had smitten the sinners. Not that he wished another human soul a moment’s suffering. But he was not yet willing to put it out of his mind as the others seemed to have done, and he walked at night searching for proof that it had not yet lapsed completely into forgetfulness.

The city had marshaled its efforts behind recovery; religion had become reasonable, gentle, and omnipresent. Services were watercolor washes of music and flowers, and the ministers wore white as if they were officiating at weddings. The goal, their flock had been admonished, had been to persevere and in time forget the bad memories and continue with only the good. As if, Magnus thought, the horror were the flesh, the final memory the skeleton, and time were decomposition. He found this offensive. How could he ever forget the worst that had happened? The boils. The vomiting. Fever and ravings. The remedies as violent as the pestilence, which never worked for long if at all. Later he found it loathsome. What good was memory that was so skittish and indulgent, so afraid of pain that it locked the door and boarded it over?

Those days had been a light so unspeakably brilliant you could neither open your eyes to it nor close your eyes tightly enough to keep it out. Even with your eyes shut you were blinded by it. It was so intense that only in retrospect could you take in its excruciating vibrancy. The change, the loss, the revelation; the multiple obliterations of them, of everything. The vividness of one minute corner of existence until it threatened to set you and the whole universe ablaze or tear you open like a knife ripping through canvas. And now nothing had that. Not even the spring blossoms could match it.
…

Martin Steele: “The Girls in the Tree”


Winning Writers subscriber Martin Steele has kindly permitted me to reprint this piece, which won a Very Highly Commended award in the 2010 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest. (Winning Writers assists with entry handling and promotion for this contest; read the latest winners here.) Born in South Africa and currently a resident of Florida, Martin is a prolific author of poetry and flash fiction characterized by lush imagery and surreal plot twists. “The Girls in the Tree” especially appealed to me because I’m writing a novel-in-progress about a fashion photographer, who would have loved to take part in the scene below.

The Girls in the Tree

The tree that the girls are on is bare because all the bark has been eaten by the elephants.

The crystal orange rays splice the painful hanging branches. Each girl a blushing pink purple petal.
The lithe soft figures blend with the orange and paleness of the earth below.

The watch clicks the minutes on the resting ‘roused sun. The colors whispers secrets onto my eyelids. My canvas tent breathes heavy morning dew. The blended apricot starkness strikes the lens of my camera like an orphaned hyacinth. The proud acacia silhouette kisses the brightening sky. Now at six in the morning the air is an aphrodisiac and my loins stirs to the low sounds of jungle beasts far, far away.

Today I will use all my male skills like a helpful circus trainer, my leica my assistant. Photographing tabloid pieces for fashion shoots is a task as trying as like feeding lions with bare hands.

The girls, the models for the lingerie shoot arrived last night. They will endure 6 hours of patient pain in the acacia tree.
My eye is on the acacia tree I have chosen on this savannah plain gradually maturing to azure. The umbrella shaped top will help with snippets of shade as will the few scant leaves left uneaten. Now as the orange gradually fades to yellow the girls in the branches of the trees smile, squirm, stretch and loll as my shutter heats up from ten hundred frames.

I have chosen this tree with bare bark eaten by elephants.

“What are those girls doing next to the beautiful elephants?”

My elephant returns soon to face his tree. The thick, broad pillar like legs and high grey back reach near to the intersection of bare tree trunk and branches stretching like Lycra. The massive head is beautiful and lotus like ears twist and fan the air. Hooflike nails are not manicured as the girls’ and the grey skin loose and lightly furrowed like chapped hands is tough and reads like a symbol of wisdom. He will never forget this scene ever as he saunters from soft wet grasses.

The skin is hairless and his slender tail is like a tuft of hair on a rabbit’s bottom.

The skin of the girls is pink and tight and soft imaging against purple panties and pink peignoirs. The faces are alive with the passion of posing. As the elephant lifts his trunk to the umbrella topped tree he recognizes a faint sweet fragrance. and will soon emit a trumpet noise when blowing through his nostrils. The girls sigh to Mozart and Chopin as the music is dreamed into their ears.

The sky has almost lost its orangeness. My elephant looks up to the nest of girls enhancing the form of branch shapes, stretches his trunk as in a goodbye salute then ambles off to loneliness and no home in particular.

My shooting is over. The girls are assisted down from the now lonely acacia.

There are smiles and excitement in the red of their cheeks and the silent sighs of their blushes. The bare skins tighten on their model figures as the hazy elephant shadow and his loose grey skin hushes Westwards.

The photos are eye piercing. I am excited.

“Mixing model beauty with African beast is a step in a young life’s excitement. There is even blood on the Polaroid.”

Everything is now packed away. The girls are dressed in jeans and sweaters and bright shirts. The pink foundation wear shows through the garment transparency.

“The last thing left is the beauty of women.”

Book Notes: Francine Witte, “Cold June”


The men and women who populate Cold June, Francine Witte’s new flash fiction chapbook, don’t have much time. They do desperate, magical, outrageous things to bridge the all-too-ordinary distances between them, the indifference of lovers and the clumsiness of communication. The rare happy marriage can almost survive the world’s end, it seems, whereas for many others, even a trip to outer space won’t rekindle the fire. This chapbook won the 2010 Thomas A. Wilhelmus Award from RopeWalk Press.

Visit Francine’s website to find out about her other poetry and fiction collections. She kindly shares two stories from Cold June below.

Arm

Eunice felt worthless, and so she put her arm up for auction on EBay. That way, she could find out her compartmental value, at least. She imagined there must be someone who would need an arm or want or an arm or anyway, not mind an arm. But to be safe, she would keep the arm attached until she had a bidder.

She asked her friend, Hank, to take the picture.

“The arm is still on you,” he said, a bit stupidly. Hank was balloony and humid and was always popping the buttons off his shirts. This really annoyed Eunice, and she kept meaning to end their friendship, but that would leave her with no one.

“Well,” Eunice said, “take the picture anyway, and we can always crop out the non-arm part of me.” Then, she dressed up the arm in tinkly bracelets and painted on a fake tattoo. She turned on the lamp, knelt at the foot of the bed, and sprawled the arm across a glittery, puffed-up pillow. That’s when she looked at Hank’s face, the drool on his mouth corners, the need in his eyes. “I’ve never seen anything more lovely,” he stammered. “It’s like a Cleopatra snake or something.”

“Would you like to place a bid?” Eunice cooed, undulating the arm in the small moon of light from the bedroom lamp.

“I’ll do even better,” Hank said. “I’d like to marry that arm.”

Eunice thought for a moment, imagining the two of them at the altar, Hank in a tux, wobbly man-penguin, and the arm next to him on the floor in bridal white.

“Of course, I’d need the rest of you to keep the arm from leaving me in the middle of the night.”

Eunice looked at Hank, who was looking at her arm in a way he had never looked at any other part of her. But still, it was something. And when Hank leaned over to kiss the arm, and popped every single one of his buttons, somehow it didn’t bother Eunice all that much anymore.

****

The Way the Vase Got Broken

Was the cat. First, he did his little purr thing, followed by his sinewy arch thing. This was all topped off by his jump thing and then that, was just that.

My wife is one of those women who could live without a vase, but not without a cat, so she didn’t yell in his guilty, Cheshire face.

Sometimes, I’m sure she likes the cat more than she likes me. I know I could never get away with breaking her vase just like that. And I’m also pretty sure that if somehow, this cat were a human cat and not a cat cat, she would divorce me and marry him.

But, in the end, we get along fine, with the cat, but no vase. Though on Valentine’s Day, when I bring her roses, she accuses me of trying to make the cat look bad.

Online Literary Roundup: Wag’s Review, Gemini Magazine, DIAGRAM


From time to time I like to highlight memorable work from some of my favorite online literary journals. In addition to the ones featured below, I regularly read Anderbo, Narrative Magazine, DMQ Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. Scoff all you will at the iPad/iPhone cult, but I’m in love with mine because they allow me to catch up on these journals without wasting work time at my desktop.

Wag’s Revue issue #6 , “Truthiness”, features fictional, nonfictional, and metafictional musings on the blurry line between fact and…everything else. One person’s assault on authorial credibility is another person’s mixed-genre innovation. Sometimes they’re the same person. With Stephen Colbert, you’re never quite sure. The man who coined “truthiness” speaks with editor Will Guzzardi about how things become true because we believe them. “My performance of myself, I think, testifies to the omnipresence of art, inasmuch as the artistic gesture ultimately comes down to an intrusion into semblance—exposing, in its brute state, the gap of the real.” Yes, that’s Colbert–or is it Guzzardi inventing what Colbert might say, if he deigned to be interviewed? Does it matter?

Other intriguing readings in this issue include an essay on the nonexistent Hiroshima poet Araki Yasusada, and Tony Tulathimutte’s story “The Man Who Wasn’t Male“, whose protagonist’s solution to the burden of performing masculinity has its own bloody, twisted logic. (Is “nonexistent” really the right word for a poet whose biography is fictitious, but whose work genuinely exists, though written by another? Read the essay and decide.)

****

Hallie Rundle’s “Asphalt Sky “, the winner of Gemini Magazine ‘s latest fiction contest, is an affecting story narrated by a girl who works for an escort service, as she seeks genuine understanding of the people she meets in a profession that depends on disconnection and illusion. The runner-up stories are also good reads.

****

In DIAGRAM issue 10.3 , Emma Ramey interviews Miss Peach, the trippy but fierce protagonist of Catie Rosemurgy’s new poetry collection The Stranger Manual. I enjoyed Rosemurgy’s earlier collection My Favorite Apocalypse and will have to pick up this volume very soon. Other useful or ornamental features in this issue include diagrams of “Antecedents of The Wasteland” and “How to Hit Back at Dive Bombers”, and Amy Marcott’s “Flying the Coop“, a story about Alzheimer’s caregivers that’s written as a discussion thread on a fictitious online message board.

Wisdom (?) from Miss Peach:

“There have only ever been two kinds of poetry: narrative and lyric. And some other kind that is sort of lyric but in a new way that sounds like a breakdown but doesn’t lead to the hospital because that’s a narrative. I say, don’t worry: narrative and lyric hate each other, but like the rest of us they share a house and make babies. They buy one another the perfect gifts.”

“To find something beautiful one must have no idea what it is.”

“Call me optimistic, but I believe that inside every girl is someone who is not a girl but who looks like one and laughs.”

Online Literary Roundup: Stories by Chad Simpson, Renee Thompson, Steve MacKinnon


Time once again to share some good reads I’ve discovered in online literary journals. Two are short-shorts, a form that’s well-suited to reading on the web, and one is a satisfying longer piece of historical fiction.

Chad Simpson’s “Phantoms“, from the new issue of Freight Stories, offers a surprising and beautiful perspective on the phenomenon of phantom limb sensation in amputees. I know, that doesn’t sound like a feel-good topic, but watch what he does with it.

Renee Thompson’s “Farallon“, a recent Story of the Week from Narrative Magazine, is a quietly compelling tale of redemption. Set in the 19th century, its main character is a criminal who’s been exiled to a rocky island to harvest gulls’ eggs. The reader, like the protagonist, may initially despair that anything meaningful could happen to a man marooned in this bare environment. Thompson solves this dilemma in a skillful and heart-tugging way.

Finally, Steve MacKinnon’s “Read Me One“, from The Pedestal Magazine, puts two men in a booth in a diner, one reading love letters to the other. This brief meditation on the nature of intimacy, and its failures, is never what you’d expect.

Sharla Benson: “The Shower”


The online literary journal Gemini Magazine has just released its February issue. Their short fiction contest, with a top prize of $1,000, will be accepting entries through May 1, for the ridiculously cheap fee of $4 per story, any length. So far my favorite piece in this issue is Sharla Benson’s “The Shower”, in which a young African-American woman pays the price of estrangement from her childhood friends when she tries to assimilate into white middle-class society:

“What you mean you ain’t going? You betta go!”

Diane paced back and forth while squeezing the phone so
tight her palm began to sweat. If only she had the ability
to hang up on her mother she would have pushed end that
very second. But she knew better.

“Now you known Cora all your life, and you’ll get to see
Madison,” her mother added with a softer tone. “I’m sure
she’ll be there too.”

Diane sighed. If that point was supposed to persuade her
to go, then she was still trying to find a valid excuse as to
why she shouldn’t. She loved Cora and Madison. As little
girls and teenagers they’d spent many Saturday hours in
Mrs. Mary’s beauty shop reading old Jet, Ebony and Black
Hair magazines, laughing and gossiping under the harsh
heat of the dryers while waiting to have their kinks
straightened with a steaming hot comb.

“Ahh! You burned my ear!” Diane would always yell when it
was her turn.

“Dat’s just the heat,” Mrs. Mary would reply sharply. “Keep
still.”

The three of them shared their dreams of the perfect man,
the number of children and the type of house they wanted,
believing that they would be best friends forever to see it
all happen for one another. But, people change and one
day playing a good game of hide and seek or house with
your baby dolls isn’t the only thing friends argue about.

“Ya’ll grew up on the same street,” Diane heard her mother
continue. “And that poor chile—it’s been Cora’s cross to
bear to have her womb strong enough to hold babies. But
now the good Lord has finally blessed her with one. So,
you will be goin’ to her baby shower. You hear me girl?”

She heard her loud and clear. But she also heard the even
louder voice in her head telling her that she did not want
to see Madison. What had transpired between the three of
them the last time they were together had not been pretty.

“Danisha! Are you listen’ to me?”

“Huh? Yes ma’am.” The call of the name she had laid to
rest a long time ago brought her back to the present. Very
few people still called her by her given name and that was
the way she preferred it.
…

Read the rest here. I also recommend xTx’s flash fiction “(Not) My Fairy Self“.

Racelle Rosett: “Levi”


This unique and memorable short story by Racelle Rosett won the 2008 Moment-Karma Short Fiction Contest. Now open for entries, this contest
offers a top prize of $1,000 for unpublished short fiction with Jewish
content. The 2010 deadline is December 31.

Rosett’s brilliantly offbeat young narrator, who sounds like he has an autism spectrum disorder (though it’s never spelled out), finds unexpected connections between Jewish tradition, yoga practice, and popular culture, as he tries to orient himself in a violent and overstimulating world.

There are 72 disturbing images on the way to my school. Saw I, Saw II, Two and Half Men. There is a billboard for jeans in which no one is wearing clothes. I don’t know why there isn’t a law about this. In another billboard there was a picture of a woman with a plastic tube up her nose. Her eyes were red and bruised underneath. My mother gasped and called the billboard company, CBS Outdoor, right from her car. My friend Gabriel’s mother called, too, and I guess about a hundred or so other mothers, because the next day in the LA Times there was an article saying the billboards were coming down. On Highland, they had the tube-in-the-nose billboard three times, so that even if I were very fast and looked down at my shoes, when I looked up again it was there three more times and another hundred or so times in my mind the rest of the day. Good morning tube-in-her-nose take out your pencils tube-in-her-nose today we’re going to learn tube-in-her-nose, tube-in-her-nose, tube-in-her-nose. Underneath the picture was the word torture, like what they did at Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq, because George Bush told them to. I hate George Bush most of all. My doctor, who is a cognitive therapist, who is six feet six inches tall and looks like Jon Heder, but more handsome (my mother says), told me to use thought-stopping techniques when this happens. He told me to imagine a stop sign crashing down into my brain, which is a disturbing image all by itself. I am identified highly gifted. My mother says that being gifted doesn’t mean that the gift is yours, it means that the gift is for the world and it is given through you, that you are chosen to carry the gift. Sometimes I feel like I have a giant chicken on my back.
…

Read the rest here.

Online Poetry Roundup: Wordgathering and Others


This past week at Reiter’s Block has been heavy on reprints, hasn’t it? Well, you all already know what I think about everything. And when you figure it out, could you please tell me?

From time to time I like to share links to my favorite online journals and poetry sites. One of the very best is Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry.  Published quarterly, Wordgathering features poetry, essays, book reviews and artwork by disabled authors and/or about the intersection of disability and literature. The blurb for their upcoming workshop at the AWP 2010 conference in Denver is a good summary of their mission:

This panel will discuss how the poetry of disability seeks to tackle and refigure traditional discourses of the disabled around an interrogation of “normalcy” and of the notions of beauty and function that have been so foundational to Western culture and aesthetics. The panel will focus on poetic strategies, including the subversion of historical discourses and the decentering of the subject through which a range of disabled poets have sought to address these issues.

Highlights of the December 2009 issue include Paul Kahn’s essay “The Deepening Fog (Part 2)”, about how his perspective as a disabled person helps him advocate for his parents in the nursing home; a review of Zimbabwean poet Tendai Mwanaka’s new collection; Rebecca Foust’s poems about her autistic son, which find beauty in what the world calls errors and mutations, without negating her maternal pain and anger; and other poems by Michael Basile and my friend Ellen LaFleche.

The Dirty Napkin is a literary journal whose content is available online for subscribers only ($16 per year). However, in each issue they feature a cover poem that can be read on the site. Their latest offering, an untitled poem from Simon Perchik, is a free-associative meditation on impermanence and beauty. Read and listen to the audio version here.

The Pedestal Magazine, edited by poet and songwriter John Amen, celebrates its ninth anniversary this month with Issue #55. The theme for this issue was speculative flash fiction. Notable contributors include Jane Yolen and Liz Argall. I also can’t resist poems about dolls, the creepier the better. Check out “The Doll After Play” by Rebecca Cross.

Kelcey Parker: “Lent”


This wise and affecting story from Image Journal explores how love sometimes manifests itself through the least obvious choices:

LENT SHOULD BE in the summer that she might make use of the hotel pool, bandaged up outside like an open wound. She never had a pool. She had a cat but her cat is dead. Buried in leftover snow behind the garage until the ground softens. It would be nice to swim in a pool. But then she remembers: I am Jesus in the desert! No swimming allowed.

I am giving you up, she told her family. For Lent.

What was hers anymore that she could give up? That no one else could use without permission, take without asking, even wear, now that the oldest was a teen and her size? Answer: the cat. The found feral cat from college, from before all of them and during all of them, tucked into the right angle of her armpit every night. But after they started arriving every couple of years, the cat (may she rest in peace) was no longer her greatest joy. They were.
You are my greatest joy, she said. And so, she addressed the question marks around the dinner table, you see what a sacrifice this is.

Of course they didn’t believe her. They never really knew how to read her. She complained of being an old lady one day and ran around making snow angels the next. She occasionally referred to them jokingly as parasites, but cried every time she read The Giving Tree. This Lent thing was obviously a joke. Except it wasn’t. She’d been doing research, Googling “Lent,” Googling “lenten sacrifice,” Googling “hotel reservations.” Here, she said, producing a receipt. She’d printed it off of Travelocity and scratched out the hotel name and address but not the city, which was the same one they lived in. You’re going to stay right here in town, they said, mockingly. I’m not giving up my whole life, she said. Just you.

…

Read the whole thing here.