Hang Up

Hello, You were my first. My normal reaction is to listen. To let people do their jobs. To give you my best ear when you pick up the phone to cold call and soft sell the hard sale. But I was working. And I thought you were someone else. The vague idea from caller idea … Read more

Topeka Reads Frederick Douglass

(includes video) In the historic summer of 2020, amidst a global pandemic and nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, Arts Connect in Topeka, KS, produced a video to celebrate the speech of Frederick Douglass which he gave on July 5, 1852, titled, What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July? William L. … Read more

The Wasteland

After all the people shouting at viewers who already agree and are galvanized like nails waiting to be hammered as if tines on a tuning fork yet somehow out of key locked in false times under their thumb. After all the people shouting from broadcast towers in places we’ve never been; people we’ve never met … Read more

Fuse

Jazz tonight…cold winter tonight…visions of Kansas bonfire nights tonight…hellish thoughts tonight…who says the tenants will be removed tonight…Langston Hughes rhythms tonight…want of alcohol tonight…if the landlord should return tonight…if the bill remains unpaid tonight…silent meditations of dreams tonight…apodictic speech to shadows tonight…if the proletariat gathers strength tonight…if the tension becomes condensed tonight…Emily Dickinson seclusion tonight…transforming … Read more

Free Kindle Download (The Confluence)

Hello you dusty ramblers and gamblers, This is to notify you in good time that the western horror novel, The Confluence, is free to download via Kindle April 14 through 17. After that the price of the ebook will go back up to the regular price. Click the image to take you there now.

EVIKT

The streets are paved in the shadow of a hustle you can’t see, only feel. There’s a hole in the wallet where money falls out just as fast as you stuff it in. Fat-cat looking out of the tower doesn’t come down to pick your pocket. He sends word down through a memo to his … Read more

Notice

The shades pulled low in the Rundown. Janitor scrubbing the towers top to bottom. Disinfecting seats of power and of defecation. Wiping receivers of oily prints. Evikt imagined them in the daylight; the drones with their prints all over the scene of the crimes, on keyboards and dry-erase porn; what she called the mailroom stockade … Read more

Noir Blanks

Street lamp. Buzz. Flicker. Highlighting rain.Clicking heels on steps. Stares. Stubstoes, cigarettes. Smudges lipstick. Lighter flicks.The nudge. Twisted neck in the crick.The river’s fresh till.Raging current. Swept under.Push and shovel. Driftwood oar. Faint waftof burning dock. Tragic pile-ons. Evidently evidencewill only be spoken, not photographed.The river’s fresh till.Mistrial and error. An air of mysterybare in … Read more

Strange Race

The last intact panel of glass had blistered and so stood upright magnifying the scene outside of the phone booth in which Russell Scales was standing.  His veins burned all up and down his arms, clinging like vines to tree trunks.  His temples were fixed in flex because his teeth were clenched to stop himself … Read more