choose your own adventure,
in Scenario one, you step out of your office, crossing the unremarkable hall into the Men’s Toilet, taking in the little hieroglyph of the stick figure with pants on the door. This is exercise, a break from computering.
By DAVID LEHMAN
Mother died today. That’s how it began. Or maybe yesterday, I can’t be sure. I gave the book to my mother in the hospital. She read the first sentence. Mother died today.
By DAVID LEHMAN
Remember rotary phones?
What did we do back then
if we didn’t have a phone
and had to walk a mile
to get to the bus stop?
Remember telephone booths?
Remember when the question was
how many college kids can fit into one telephone booth?
By DAVID LEHMAN
In the bronze distance the last shepherds wander.
The last just man is an angry sinner
Who leaves without a word after a deafening dinner.
The flag of his desire is waving his banner.
![[What They Were Building…]](https://thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/5428199672_e5b9f562f6_m.jpg)
A fine kettle of fish, an ancient Mesopotamia
unearthed anew. Mystic cities, the press
of fertile crescents,
thighs wide like to lay seed in. Literal rivers.
By YANG JIAN
He was old.
She, too, was old.
Their years, like lightning, slit the heart of the passerby.
By MO FEI
Booming, spring shoves open the door,
Blocks of ice wash down the river.
While some people stay in youth,
Some regret and grow old.
from The Pocket Encyclopedia of Revolutionary Violence, for the Years 1066-2092, vol 1, entry 1
The weir-trap is set. Iron stakes pounded into the bed of the saltmarsh arc from the blacksoil into the shallow reeds, straw crosshatching the stakes,
a water-net for the sprats and silver pike, eels, and the marshcray hunched among the reedbone husks in the mud.
Death is easier
than love. And true feeling, as someone said,
leaves no memory. Or else memory
replaces the past, which we know
never promised to be true.
That was one idea my mother
always disliked. She preferred her god
to be reasonable, like Emerson or Thoreau
without their stranger moments.
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