“I’m helping you get in touch with your heritage,” Susana said to Tom, foisting the grocery bag onto the counter.  She pulled the tub of sour cream out, along with a ziploc bag of cheddar cheese

you are a holiday routine

i dreamt shirt collars and close hands
i woke up in the bark of a dog
i soaked in a bath of fog and breath
i scrubbed myself with roasted marshmallow
i dressed

Opus 53

Place the palms of your hands side by side on this wine glass. After a short time, raise your hands and place your eyes at the same level as your palms.

Notice the possible and

What I could buy with the insurance money they gave me when you died:

One Ferrari, red or black, assuming V-8 instead of V-12, assuming premium gas, assuming insurance, assuming no major

I’m in Tom's apartment staring at the big deer head he has hanging on the wall of his living room. Tom has a small place and the deer head looks enormous. Some kind of giant, mutant deer, like it's

-   after Directing Herbert White / Writing Ellen West

When James Franco first spoke to me, he said, “Oh, shit. You’re Mr. Hip. We were just talking about you before the reading.”

·  

My feelings of purposelessness and inadequacy vanished. My feelings of self-pity and despair were replaced by love and affection. No more sleeping around. No more yearning for The One. I had found Her. She was here.

This essay is not about Star Trek in the way that Star Trek is not about space.

Woodcutter

It started when you dreamed you were dead & I had to go looking in other rooms for your body. Turned on each light & either I found you or it was apparent by then that

She asks me to tell her a story. Almost every night she can’t sleep. I’m no storyteller, I’ll say, and at first I would start off with robots and fantastic bears, trying to make my own Where the

Death in the Family

my car scraped you and your bike alongside the highway,

in the grade below me over at the public high school
edged off the median at just the wrong second I

Mathematics IIIIIIIIIII

A miracle trapped in a fur coat. A fur coat trapped in its original body.

Mathematically speaking, the body is made up of four essential parts: the arms, the ideas,

I am driving through the hill country when I spot up ahead, in the dip between two hills, this young buck with his thumb out, sleeveless, flaunting the white underside of a supple tanned bicep

I was wearing white lipstick when I pressed a kiss onto the dirty window in the back corner of his mother’s garage, pasting spider silk and bone-colored dust to the glass. I left that mark to be

Polyphase Signals

I sit in the morning garden
slick
from last night’s rain

ants run in circles
across
the iron table   except

for one   perched on the
lip
of my Mother’s

Founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America’s best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. 

Lance Olsen is the author of twelve novels, one hypertext, five nonfiction

I dream of seeing your beautiful face somewhere other than in the familiar expressions captured in photographs on the internet

I spend my free time an appropriate amount of bed sick. I keep a lot of spare pieces of glass up my carpeted self. I mean a literal debris of glass happens when I sit forward.

Essay On The Theory of Motion

You remember reading a poem once about a boy driving his grandmother to the library across town. Someone said that the car is a perfect device for giving a poem

I stayed in the monastery for a month to read the entire Bible in the Luther translation in German. My reward was that every evening, I would get a pint of ale that the monks made right there, and it came from large rotting oak barrels, which enhanced the flavor. After Gregorian chants, prayers, and then a couple of halb-liter, the monks were pretty close to God.

The girl you spent a whole summer watching Beverly Hills 90210 and eating McDonald’s lunches with ran up behind you, taking hold of your backpack.

I ran into myself at the grocery store the other day. The store had just run out of Cookie Crisp cereal. The worst part was that I'd gone to the store specifically to get the cereal, along with

The Doctor’s Office

is windowless. He asks me to undress—You can wear this. He places a large white bird wing in my lap. It’s winter. I’m holding gloves. Then he’s back and I’m lying on the

POSTCARD

It is just beautiful –
the waves look like nothing

and the stars

choke on the air.

VARIOUS DISTANCES

I still can see you,
on the steps without
a

I start working in the bakery because I think of it as romantic. I count each sugared donut while composing hypothetical letters to past lovers – half-invented, half-remembered.

Last night was

Another dry day, so I build my wall—cinderblocks delivered to my driveway— and another house for sale sign comes down and the new neighbors, like the old, watch as I build a cinderblock wall around