Sadness has no reasons. Sadness is a luxury of spare time, a piece of pie leftover, the blueberry’s skin caught between your teeth, the black blear of happiness.

Use your grandmother’s knitting needles if they are steel and sharp, her crochet hooks. Hell, you could even use the split edge of this table. Slide your inner arm against the jagged grain, watch the splinters scrape you raw.

Benito like the oaf he wasinvaded Greece and got defeated

She carries my chair,she carries my walker,she carries my commode,she drops my heart   so hard it breaks into a hundred pieces

A paranoid office-worker relieves the alienation she feels in her job by writing experimental lyric prose.

No one explains things to dogs. The voice that’s missing has left its aroma everywhere,along with the faint stale smells of those who used to be here:

Honourable mention in the 8th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

“Thank god for you,” Polly said one day after work, as she and Ruth sat under the fluorescent lights of the town’s only bar. “You’re the only normal one here.”

langwage binds us 2gethr separatelee n parts n sharing almost replikating nevr reelee xact wun uv th biggest communal spells we ar all bound n unbound in

"Naked men. At each other all the time, all day long. I can’t get it out of my head."

A poem from Randall Magg’s book about Terry Sawchuk, the legendary hockey goalie who got his start with the Detroit Red Wings.

a rascally lab-shepherd and grumpy old cat didn’t much like each other

sat behind the trailers with julie eatingthe peanut butter sandwiches peter’swife made that morning by the park sink

A young boy gets his first pair of tweezers after overhearing locker room conversations about body hair in this excerpt from God Loves Hair by Vivek Shraya.

From Lemon Hound, a poetry collection published by Coach House books in 2006.

When I overhear my parents talkabout the death of Dorothy Stratten,the Playboy playmate first discoveredin a Vancouver Dairy Queen,I somehow confuse her with the womanwho sold my family our tent trailer.

Runner-up in the 2nd Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

it’s easy: you pour a mug of beer & then a shot of bourbon. you light a match

I began to run across 42nd Street, a trail of beer nuts behind me, making my way to TimesSquare, because I thought I should see The Lion King or smoke crack before I die, but could afford neither.

She lives in Prince George. in plastic bags on tuesday nights we load frozen corpses from industrial-sized freezers into the back of the suzuki.

Three walked barefoot into the sea,mother, father and only childwith trousers rolled above the knee.A stretch of water—half a mile;granite loaves made a cobbled road when the tide was low. Tide was high.

An excerpt from Moss-Haired Girl by R.H. Slansky, the winning entry in the 2013 International 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest.

When the winds came, we lashed ourselves to fir trees because we knew what they were and where they stood.

It isn’t what you think. I’m not just another American gringo,chasing old lady luck South.Staring wide-eyed at their beautiful skin,at the bones of the burros,the dogs and the rats. It’s not why I’ve come, to stare, to open my eyesthis wide, sucking the lemon before I drink.