excerpts from: Stories in Search of Beginnings, Middles, Ends, and Sides

Ah, M’amour, Mais Pourquoi?

          “Mais, bien sur!”

           Ugh, she thought. He’s speaking ‘French’ again. And not  even good French. Once he’d told her, “Mon amie, j’ai besoin la mer sur ton tete!”

You need the sea on my head? She’d asked him.

“Ha ha! It is an excellent joke!” he’d replied. He grinned like an idiot, and she told him so— or at least told him partly.

“Idiot!,” is what she’d actually said.

“Ha ha ha!” he laughed. And now, he was doing it again, speaking some kind of dickish fake French that infuriated her and made her hate him even more. He was her husband, but come tomorrow, she would be long gone. “Speak English,” she muttered just loud enough for him to hear but not so loud that he could be certain he’d understood.

“Oui, oui, mon petit spatule!”

“Get out of my way,” she hissed at him as she stepped past him into the bedroom. “You just called me a spatula.”

“Ha ha ha ha!” he laughed, delighted by his error.

Possibly to Do with Herschel’s Anus

bits      around   the dying       star. Sad to      see end. Herschel’s telescope told of art      of the    story. For    the rest, a      simple all, and   behind the last      door was oratory where Herschel’s assistant had astronomers argued, nevertheless, for ray.

But Herschel had a darker seen something beyond the last past         the Kuiper       Belt. With  his ass as able       to conclude that the         dwarf Earth. Herschel had never      told his ass in telling anyone what he’d seen. one would know anyway, at least fore the most catastrophic collision

Thee and Thou

“Who,” Don asked the new poets, “do you read?” He took a long pull on his pipe, exhaled a plume of magenta smoke, and took an inch off the top of his cup of wine. Back then, professors could be just that cool.

“I read limericks,” one of the idiots said. “Nepo,” another idiot offered.

“Ogden Nash,” the third idiot ejaculated. Don was pleased. Only three idiots this time.

Derek Owens teaches at St. John’s University, New York, and lives on Long Island. Information on his art, writing, and teaching can be found at derekowens.net.

Michael Blitz is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of NY. He graduated SUNY Albany: Bachelors Degree 1980, Masters in ‘84, Doctorate in ‘86.