like myself we have a tendency to be paranoid about our origins. Sometimes I suspect I am not who I think I am, like maybe I died a long time ago and somebody took my brain and stuck it in this body. Maybe there never was a real me in the first place, and I'm completely synthetic.

The sea was particularly calm that day. The calmest he'd ever seen it. They ran into the water, barely touching the ground, and dove-- shattering the surface like ice. He found her under the lukewarm surf and, emerging, swung her around to face him. They found themselves in a very peculiar situation at that moment. The atmosphere of the day ( Read more... )

I am writing a story-I don't know how long it will be or anything else about what form it will take-but since several of you had asked to read more of my fiction if I wrote more, here is some to get you started. Your comments on it are both welcome and much appreciated.On the back of the letter from Max’s mother to Joanna he’d written the ( Read more... )

(This was a freewrite I did a while ago. And when I say free, I mean free. But the point of the exercise was to keep writing whatever came to your mind, so.)

Love. Was that not what Grandfather told me? It bottled and ran from me like bile from a lemon-drop throat. Or softer, gums rotted in young caramel. Foul, foul, it stroked the baby's head and ( Read more... )

The events this poem was based upon were relayed to me by a former professor who had kept in touch with a friend she met at an international conference on literature. The friend was Iraqi and wrote to her after their home had been looted in early 2005.

letter to a friend in Iraq, November of 2005

you're not at all alone, even here in the ( Read more... )

How big a role does the consideration of these things play in writing stories, whether short stories or longer pieces, i.e. novel(la)s ( Read more... )

”Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.” -Jorge Luis Borges
You have convinced me to resign. Once again, I will be known as a man of belles-lettres. And with the echo of mountains that always fill my life in hindsight, with saudades, I will go and look for places with ( Read more... )

It’s been so long.
2 years, almost. 2 years since they told me what you supposedly said about me. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they lied. Maybe they misunderstood. I never knew. And yet it broke my heart.
It was breaking again tonight. I broke it myself, walking past you without saying a word, not deigning to look at you. I know you did. Stopping ( Read more... )

magical realism

"it doesn't matter, cry and make believe that I don't exist"-Clarice Lispector ( Read more... )

for José Saramago
16 November 1922 - 18 June 2010

memória, tudo é infinito
mar, além do mar, o sol além da luzif you wake in the morning, and a ( Read more... )