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Kaddish

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,Take these broken wings and learn to fly,All your life...You were only waiting for this moment to arrive.—Blackbird, John Lennon and Paul McCartneyFor… More

The Last Run (An Excerpt)

Louis Gentry stood outside Kings County Hospital. His new shoes killing him. A forty-five year old ex-con with a limp in his left leg—a nerve severed by a shiv… More

Hero of the Quotidian

It was in the golden, grasshopper-drenched spring of my eighth year that I first purposed to become a police officer, when I watched the grim-faced deputies arrest and carry… More

Walls (an excerpt)

On the other side of the world, thirty years after Billy died in Vietnam, Brophy lay face down the grass of another valley as bullets hit the ground nearby.… More

Madness

What if Madness is nothing more than a pawn assigned to particularly susceptible individuals by an infinitely corrupt and evil shot-caller? What might one discover if he could see… More

Prisoner

In the confusion/ of the thunderstorm/ they broke out, sliced/ their hands to ribbons/ on the razor wire/ because they had to More

The Glove Compartment

For everyone in else in my family, the realization came gradually: a gesture here, a phrase there eventually added up to what they had seen all along but had… More

All Heaven’s Lights

Pete Miller woke up exasperated—he'd almost caught it but like a thief, the scent had escaped with his dream.. The old cowboy rubbed sleep from his rheumy eyes, wondering… More

Prison Poets

Everywhere solitary prisoners begin to create the words of the new dialogue.- Octavio Paz, 1949 The poet in him flounders in a morass of lies and distortions about his conquered… More