Prose Arcana

The guest poet, a Ukrainian, speaks from his throat and off the roof of his mouth, his words jumping off the foam of his waves.

The shelves were both empty and full. A mustiness that spoke of dead books written in dead languages, cereal that had been on the shelf too long, and the garage corners piled with old clothes pushed into my nostrils.

Perhaps you would like to try.

I want to tell you about the koalas I am seeing in the Blue Mountains, the chambered nautilus I fished up from the Pacific, the meerkats blinking in the African sun, the okapis swishing their tails in the Congo rainforests.

In the beginning was a "me" and this me persuaded other people to make shovels and, starting at the river, dig canals and ditches.

It was evening in California when it happened in Japan.

A free man met another man wearing a crown on the road. He reached up and knocked it off.

Chris had a key which he didn't know the use for

A successful predator of human beings would either trick the senses or be of a substance that our five could not detect.

Red light flickered across the bedroom wall, outlining the arthritic shadow of the live oak that had stood in the Fever's front yard for centuries, before the government surveyors came up this canyon with their yellow transits to set benchmarks to show that the land was no longer wild, that it was partible into number quadrants.

Smoky rocks turned ashen as the sun scraped the water off their granitic shellbacks.

One day, a leap frog leaped to his death.

He wanted to explore the house, not eat it.

For another exercise in the group, I had members draw three cards from a deck I'd prepared in advance.

The needle's the part I hate the most.

Memory's like -- like an iron cockroach. An iron cockroach stuck in a tube of toothpaste.

Not even the rain has as small hands as a premonition.

The one that I call Cain spoke and asked the question of all the years: "Why don't we kill one another?"

A white marble-monument, a pyramid with a gigantic bead perched on it, ten feet past the last twisted stand of manzanita.