Culture slithers forth, tastes the air, tests it, before ascending the throne. Haughty, sinister, the word sounds like vulture, stinks of well-powdered carrion in my nostrils. In the name of the concept, I smile, I bow; meanwhile, the gorge collects itself, preparing to mount an assault. The seeds of my life are stories. This journey has bloody, vital roots but ends in banality. My grandparents gathered secretly along a cod-stinking wharf, in a basement Fado bar in Porto with other pl...

Ghostwriting is a terrible way to live, but there's all sorts of crap people do to pay the bills. First of all, some of us have what's called a "faulty decision-maker". We believe we have greatness inside, and we don't want to spoil the deal. The theory then goes on to describe how sinking into a couch, while holding a soggy beer cozy that sports the logo, '"Welcome to Moronville, population: YOU" in your hand leads to greatness more readily than seeking gainful employment. Some of us, ...

My mother's father, Reuben Hoffman (you can look him up), had a defect in his color-responsive cells, the cones of his retina--making him colorblind. He passed the X-chromosome to my mother, and she forwarded the darned thing on to me, and to my younger brother, too. You get a lot of you-know from people--friends, family--everyone, for the most part, when they find out about the colorblindness. I mean, you're not missing a leg or commoding into a bag. They can make fun of you if they like...

A Sense of Time A strange sun follows me where I go trying pale white water paint to pretend colors I cannot believe: a pale blue mountain side becomes a thin, pale sea. I am in the forest underneath the trees where the rivers run under a lazy, speckled sun running through river bells to a moonlit, soundless sea. Tossed far into the running winds my way of life passed into dreams: should one death hang me so? I hang, dripping from the sky into the tremendous wealth and...

Crestone, Colorado something living here in the death of winter. what lives buries its belly next to the earth sticking stalky roots and stems into the ice ducking below the shallow air. this stubble of plants clutch to something i cannot understand. I am nothing, here nothing acknowledges my boots in the snow, the snow is ice, gives nothing to the texture of my boot soles, gives nothing to my weight or heat, silently breathing wind to dry away my voice and i am go...

You're the Writer why does he have to die you're the writer she said looking up from the dark with a finger scratching there and here and i say what because i had forgotten with the smell of apples in her hair and all through the room even as the fan blew rotating blasts of wind rhythmically around the night inside these walls which forever are forever Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved. Taboo's Ezine Navigator: Article Ind...

when it happenend she told me he turned from red to blue he gasped for air reflexes she was crying, too, mind (hers) couldn't take it in but it did get in daryl is dead. Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved. Taboo's Ezine Navigator: Article Index Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home The Phallic Suggestion Stone Soup Blog Forum

Somebody's Mother Early on in her life, Susan Sanders found she was left out from the Marxist revolutionary activities of her parents, while her older, aggressive brother was earmarked for significant participation. Disenchanted with her parents’ social vision, she rebelled against the rebellion, and her father turned a neglectful shoulder while her mother became abusive. She attended Clark College briefly, but soon fled the institutional stagnancy in order to follow a young man who...

innate people i have waded through the ancient nile and driven north to the end of roads. why She asked and i told her about it in a letter. not everything is a beginning, i write. worlds wrap their way around the old, withering bend, a ruinous, curving blue that is sky and sea and also nothing, always the same, circling like the ancient Eagle around the fact of death. there are people whom i love, but such people are ideas with blurry faces, silent reverberations of p...

illusions Bright brows, rising and waiting, you wed my moment to silence; a darkness that brings beauty, that is what you mean to me. You lower blond locks over your lips smiling and saying illusions aloud; these illusions i hold to me as truth. They are all i see of you. Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved. Taboo's Ezine Navigator: Article Index Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home The Phallic Suggestion Stone Soup Blog For...

Sad I can see things the way they always were: once, her stepfather mowed their yard with a push blade just two wheels and the rusted blade churning up the grass and when she touched the clippings the color was like cider on her fingers and he let her try to push, the handle high above her head, the heavy iron weighted irrevocably to the earth. It was like that with everything after awhile, pushing hard at things much too large, her young body too soft to understand things ...

Ten Minutes little or no time at all this boot comes off and candle lit like so; something moves on the wall something in your eyes pillow propped blanket dropped; our last night spent in ten minutes. Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved. Taboo's Ezine Navigator: Article Index Taboo Tenente: A Thinker's MFA Journey - Home The Phallic Suggestion Stone Soup Blog Forum

End of Something It is monday or anyday on the sidewalk summer’s end a young woman smiled at me from her porch today as I was walking my way to work. Monday like any other day and I am where I always am. The wind attends to the leaves and the shadows diffuse without the sun. A hundred people walking today at the end of summer’s month young woman sips her cooling tea and watches where I pass. Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved. Taboo's Ez...

I'm in this way. It's like a way, sort of, when things happen over and over and you begin to suspect that this is the way things are. It's not good. But it's not really bad. Or, at least, it's not as bad as you expected "bad" to be. You're not way out there, you're not on your way; no, you're just in this way. When it's like this, you have to begin. You have to look for some place to start and then, when you realize there isn't any place, you just, you know, start to begin. You...