— Loose Words —
Uncollected fiction, essays, poetry and performance
The Order of Things
Essay, Club Plum
Vol 5, No. 1, January 5, 2024
It’s only me who sees the dust on the bookshelf as absence.
Temporal Fixes
Essay, Lost Balloon,
May 31, 2023
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Indian beads hang like cartoon rain from the door frame, thundering as we move in and out of the bedroom. You want the same for the den and I yield to your desires. After you cook up a storm, I back into the beads like a waiter passing through a service entrance to protect the bounty on our plates.
Breathing through your nose is supposed to rejuvenate the body and maybe even straighten crooked teeth. I read this in a book, the kind my wife would have scoffed at.
Heart Device: A User’s Manual
F-Words
Essays, republished with commentary, SugarSugarSalt
November 20, 2023
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Essay, JMWW, March 14, 2023
Theory of Flight
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My father’s caregiver rose from her chair at his celebration of life for what I imagined would be a few rueful words but instead burst into a hymn that shot our down-to-earth, secular gathering into the clouds…
Mad Scientists
Essay, Pithead Chapel, Vol. 12, Issue 4, April 1, 2023
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In a rare lucid moment, he asked, “Can’t you bring me back to normal?” I pursed my lips helplessly, wishing for an elixir to reverse his decline.
Essay, Star 82 Review Vol 11.1, March 2023
Breathless
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In your deep sleep, you pushed away the mask so I held it above your face, certain the oxygen would save you. You would have hated the pandemic, but I miss the lockdown, the brisk walk home after dinner in my bubble…
Essay, Bending Genres
Issue 28, August 2022
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Unbidden, I Conjure Up My Great Uncle Noah in the Ablative Case
amō
I love your white dress shoes, the double-breasted white suit buttoned up against a striped tie, how you are still so dapper at age forty-nine. You hold the hand of your seven-year-old niece Helen in the backyard of your brother’s house in Brockville, Ontario.
Finding the Form
Blog, The New Quarterly, July 2022
New stories and CNF both play with Silver Age comic book ads, one for selling seeds to earn prizes, the other a pitch from Norman Rockwell for a free drawing test.
Writing Spaces
Blog, The New Quarterly, July 2022
To my left, next to the window, on a kind of literary clothesline, I’ve pegged 14 images of Fernando Pessoa who is often striding through the streets of Lisbon.
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Click image to read the entire piece.
Click image to read the entire piece.
Sleepovers
Essay, JMWW,
October 13, 2022
I cannot recall precisely why we married in 2014 after living together for nearly eight years. Probably it was a test. If I wasn’t willing to marry her, she said once, then I must love her less than I did my first wife. Her words had been defiant rather than tearful, born from the resilience of surviving an abusive childhood. She always said I could drown in a glass of water. Maybe we married so I could soak up her courage.
Live Wire
Essay, Star 82 Review
Issue 10.3, August 2022
The wire that passes from the cottage to the guest house is buried in an iron pipe rather than a rubber hose. My brother struck it when he was digging a hole for my mother’s cremains in the garden. I don’t know if the impact of steel against iron caused a spark.
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Heart Device: A User’s Manual
Essay, carte blanche, Vol. 36, 2019 Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
The monitor is designed to automatically gather information from your implanted heart device.
Your espion, your spy. Under cover of skin, darkness and duvet, it observes the moonlight streaming through the window of the root cellar, the ratty notebook and the thick pencil stained with olive oil, how you cope with the punishment by writing about the lone donkey baying outside. It measures the heat of the desert, the warmth of the sea, the depth of the snow, the thickness of the ice. It registers the bruises on your shoulders, the scars on your wrist, the tremor in your hand, the house on your back.
Corn-on-the-cob and lost wallets
Essay, Confabulation, March 21, 2020
I’m thirteen years old. It’s a Saturday in July. We’re at the farmer’s market in Brockville, a small town near our cottage.
I’m helping my Dad buy corn on the cob. Which means, I’m standing there holding the plastic bag. You remember plastic bags?
He’s husking the cobs. Or dehusking the cobs. I’m not sure of the verb. He gets his thumb nail right into those kernels of corn. And if they don’t spring back just the right way, he’ll toss him back in the wagon, and pick another one. It’s just the way he is. He has high standards, for himself, for me, for the government, and for corn on the cob.
Childhood
Essay, Numéro Cinq, Vol. 8, No. 6, 2017
In 1961, my parents buy a split-level, four-bedroom house in a new subdivision in the west end of Ottawa called Pinecrest, a middle-class suburb where none of the mothers work (outside the house), and the kids walk home for lunch to find the front door unlocked. They are creating more space for their unexpected third child — me — although I never seem to find it.
For People Who Like to Draw
Star 82 Review, 10.2, 2020
On those rare times she spoke, I heard her words as an incantation that would reveal her mystery. But they never did. How did she even know what team I followed? Perhaps she had looked at my scrapbook and saw the Boston crest on the sweater of the goalies I drew.
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Call and Response
Montréal Serai, June 27, 2020
Shortlist, Smokelong Quarterly Grand Micro Competition, 2024
When I see “no beards” and “past settled,” I stroke my chin thoughtfully for stubble and look for a woman who reads Faulkner.
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Photo: Sylvestre Guidi Click on image for link.
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