Here’s Schubert at 17, short and thick, nickname Schwämmerl, “little mushroom,” deep in his cups at the Hunter’s Horn, a dingy beer hall in Vienna, with the after-opera crowd, poetasters and brainy pundits shilling vitriol—bullshitters, all of them...
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Blessing for the Lice Check
Miss Rosier, who was childless, had us bow our heads to our fifth-grade desks on the appointed day, as though for prayer. She slowly ran the side of a pencil from the nape of each neck to the top of each head. We tried not to shiver as the pencil...
People have started Saying, “Nip it in the Butt”
Is this a mishearing of “bud” or a mash-up with “Come back to bite one in the ass,” the desire to breed a new expression from established ones, the way my daughter’s science class imagined mating superheroes to see which powers the offspring would...
Two Poems by Hussein Ahmed
Suppose it Rained in Harmattan Suppose everything beneath this sky wasn’t dying of loneliness – or hunger. Suppose we sought a new God that cannot stand the sight of blood. Suppose there’s a new God in town, and nothing edible goes on...
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From A Series of Portraits of the Most Dominant Possessions in Rap Music
#1 A Portrait of a Gold-link Chain Great material of this kind requires mastery, requires great digging, yes, a great digger, and a heavy, well-stropped shovel. It purports the need for a good licking, a pounding and beating to leaf, or the material...
Taking The Service Road
Ice on asphalt, fog on wing mirrors, land flat, a yardstick, a bad tire, dry rot on the sidewall, the map of where I’ve been— Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, the mechanic tells me, hard times lurk, bad news ahead. On to Milwaukee, to Minneapolis— I mistake the...