To Float in the Space Between

"My coming-of-age story begins unheroically with me on a college bunk reading [Etheridge Knight's] 'The Idea of Ancestry' in a literature textbook.' It may be that poets coming of age staring across space as the speaker does in that poem. I read the poet's biography: a black man from Mississippi, a prisoner who became a poet. I didn't know anything then about 'constructed speakers' in poems; I believed the 'I' of the poem was Etheridge Knight. I recognized him."

~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes

#fridayreads redux

Shipped paperback copies of Auggie's Revenge and Fight for Your Long Day remain available at reasonable prices. There are also affordable copies of Auggie's Revenge at Apple Books, on eBay, and for Kindle as well as at Bookshop and Smashwords.

this outhouse of a city

"I went outside, sat on the steps, and fired up a Marlboro from the pack I'd bought from the machine near the front door. I was through for the day. I'd had my fill of defeat. But the late spring afternoon was sublime. I watched two sleek ravens on the asphalt a few feet away as they tore apart the flattened carcass of a dead squirrel. The thoroughfares were glutted with cars and trucks and buses going who knows where. It came to me at that moment that one day I'd have to skip town myself. Where I'd go. I didn't know, but it would have to be far away. It wasn't working out for me in this outhouse of a city, and my gut told me it never would."

~~ from God Bless America by Mark SaFranko

Brad Listi's Other People with Scott McClanahan

West Virginia's Scott McClanahan discusses with Brad Listi friendship, flood, and his new novel Fights!

Loser III is green, / And on the scene.

Mai Bell and Conor Hultman's Loser III is available, and submissions might not yet be closed for Loser IV.

never once having to punch the clock

"When I thought about it, I had to marvel at how lucky our employers had come up in the cosmic lottery. Inheriting a factory, for example, was nothing to sneeze at—that was Sir Schonenstein . . . or bring sent to Europe for an advanced degree—we had one of those . . . or being groomed to take over daddy's medical practice.

"Never once having to punch the clock is a sweet way to spend seventy or eighty or ninety years . . . and then there were those scintillating evenings at the Trenton Country Club, where all the elite gathered for play . . . and the winter vacations down in the islands . . . the Harvard class reunions . . . 

"No matter what the wise men said, time is not an illusion, and life can be long and hard if you happen not to be one of the chosen few."

~~ from God Bless America by Mark SaFranko