In his first book, Dead Funny, Rudolph Herzog explored the tricky history of humor and satire addressing Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. The Atlantic named Herzog’s debut one of their Best Books

Suppose the policeman does not come when you call him for help. So what good is the phone? What good is the policeman? Suppose the policeman is distantly related to a little Polish man who has

Curation

I told my first lie to a girl with a Hans Christian Andersen name, holding onto the metal bars in the playground while I spoke. The smell of pennies stayed on my hands until

Where Everywhere Snow, There Grass

There was a patch of grass. There was snow
around the patch of grass. There was me.
I am not about the snow; the snow is not about
me. Although

NOTE: This is the second of four installments in this series. We will be featuring two hamburger joints at a time. Read installments 1 and 2.

ABSTRACT

Within the pages of this report I’ve

Note to critics: Nicolas Winding Refn is your better.

The three of them were in the car headed eastbound I-90, on their way to Tiny’s Farm, when Millard thought of his first name of the day.

“Abraham,” he said. “That’s got to be the

Thing Being

               Écriture feminine

I was told on a train I was after

delicate—or something to do

with feathers. I heard bird, bird

bird. I heard the word

He led her blindfolded through the kitchen, down the steps to the backyard. “Birthday girl,” he had whispered to her this morning, offering her coffee in bed. 

In first grade

we had to make
a little booklet
about our dads.

You take a sheet
of paper, fold it
fold it again

and then draw
a picture
on every page.

Well, on the

will become

the morning your boots are filled with so much gravity that it is impossible to walk up or fall down a hill, will be the morning before violence. on this morning, the edge of

I’ve been shocked by reactions to This Is The End on two separate occasions. The first was after I’d seen the movie (three times) and a male acquaintance was shocked that a girl would even like it,

"Hills Like White Elephants" on a waffle.

The gouges / in the floor will become your scars, even as you erase / the life you had together. The floor is your map.

Parricide

Finally they took over the city of my father,
filled it with mosquitoes and bush fog, threw him
in a river of flamingo feces. His snide asides
fell on foreign ears, for

One summer, under the streetlamps, the storm clouds, our friend on life support...

NOTE: This is the second of four installments in this series. We will be featuring two hamburger joints at a time. Read the first installment HERE.

ABSTRACT

Within the pages of this

Sound for Fishes

Swim with a rock clutched between your teeth, apple-like. Have a friend do the same. Bang your rock against his rock. It will look like bad CPR. Sound is loudest

Anything worth saying can be rendered / as an aphorism, might itself be an aphorism, / just so you know     My phrase of the moment / is radiant action...

The new neighbors were moving vans and glimpses behind curtains. In time, they became an electronic fiction behind a white trellis fence. My dog could smell their vacancies.

My boyfriend cut off my arm while I slept. He had thought the whole thing through months in advance, he told me the next morning.

He slides an open palm up and down wallpaper that appears to depict horsemen and battalions in battle. He presses an ear to it. He tilts a framed print of Caravaggio’s Holofernes away from the wall.

George Strait’s in this poem now, he’s meddling
with everything.  He’s reading words
with the wrong inflections, making me older
than I know how to be. He wants Texas in here;
[defend

Remember being mammalian in the friar patch?

Remember your best reserve for slattern hells?

Remember being mammalian?

This gizmo stuck in my fuss like a picnic,

I turned my head so fast / I mistook the moon / for a firework / and then I wanted // to bark too...

Daniel heard it driving home...