“What is the soul?”
“A small blue thing that runs about within us.”
— Dryden, The Tempest
Hunchback Assistant Tells All
1 My dear Mrs. Shelley — No, that won’t do — she’s neither “mine” nor dear — To Mary — No, that sounds like a dedication, when nothing of that…
Dirty Dishes
Cassie always knows what I’m thinking. She told me about the whole ESP thing just before we moved in together. How she had inherited the gene from her mother’s mother…
Points of Entry
The oldest god was MAAA. Though he didn’t think with words like ‘god’ yet. Or spirits, or entities, or monsters, or angels or demons. MAAA was primal, elemental. MAAA was…
Stairway to Nowhere
1. It’s been fifty years since I first heard the Pipes of Eld. I was fifteen when the ancient-modern sound emerged: flutes, crude wood or shining silver, reed-pipes, recorders and…
Messiah in America
Act I The curtain goes up. Menachem-Josef sits at the table with his secretary Jackie Bluffer, a healthy, loud-mouthed boy with more balls than brains. Menahem wears large, black-framed glasses.…
The Strange Death of Annabel Lee
Part 2 of The Strange Voyage of Annabel Lee(a spoondrift, a flickering filmstrip, even a dream) A recap of part one: Edgar is searching for Annabel and, after stumbling into…
The Sensitive
In those early days of Lily Dale, long before it was even known as Lily Dale or, before that, City of Light, our freethinking earthly compatriots were fond of organizing…
Reviews: Jean Lorrain, Edmund Spenser
Jean Lorrain: Errant Vice, translated by Brian Stableford, Snuggly Books 2018 Another brilliant book by the unsung master of French decadence. The stories and the novella gathered between these covers…
Poems of Berkeley and Jerusalem
On Hearing the Cafe Mediterraneum is About to Close But I live here.drinking ghost coffee, writing poemsand wondering why the morning papersnever get older?I mean, I have an address and…
Green Silk
It was like walking into the unreal calm of a landscape painting. Mountains and forests were half-hidden by mist in the distance. The far off crags seemed to float in…