To: h.prentiss@ancientaliens.thc.com
From: m.salmone@ancientaliens.thc.com
Re: Copier JamHey Hankster ( Read more... )

I spent Sunday and Monday adapting my essay, Kalighat, into a five-minute story to tell at The Moth StorySLAM in Chicago last night ( Read more... )

_____________________________________________

the aerialist who started in a wheelchair looks at the aerialist who finished in a wheelchair and says

whenever someone says inspiring!
I think you mean sexyonly lately I have stopped thinking it and started to speak it ( Read more... )

Well, it’s my job to brief you, and I’m not happy about it, but I’m going to do my job. We’re all gonna do our jobs, and we’re counting on you for everything else. This is what you spent four years preparing for. This is why you never limited yourself. And now-with a volcanic asteroid headed directly for Earth-you’re the one we need ( Read more... )

You put your meme in my prose poem! You put your prose poem in my meme!

_____________________________________________________

I've come to realize that my last kiss is no longer memorable, I miss the days of navigating braces, meeting clandestinely in the hall, disapproving administrative looks. I am listening to the hum of the ancient fridge, ( Read more... )

Bal Thackeray has died, and so has my father.

On the way to the station, I stopped to buy the Times of India, just to catch up. Newspaper sellers were the only thing open, and by “open”, I mean doing business on makeshift tables of plywood on sawhorses, surrounded by tarped-over fruit stands, some with the sellers still sleeping atop them. When Bal ( Read more... )

Someone has written “Barcelona” on the top step, eye level from beneath the stage, to avoid a repeat of that terrible “Hellllooooo Ohio!” outside Detroit last year. He hitches up his jeans and wishes for hips, then wishes for her hips, for a sign to direct him, “Tell her you miss her”, or “Don’t ask about the kids”.

He has the best life in the world ( Read more... )

And there were lanterns, doubled in the water.

-Donald Justice, “Sadness”

I’m young, laughably young and yet I’m thirty,
Thirty-two really, but I’d like to think I’m thirty.
Years ago, I thought one day I’ll marry, around thirty.
Ten years now, already past the third
                             ( Read more... )

There’s a village. With a bakery. A good bakery. Best bread around, rye, wheat, raisin, semolina, and a shelf of day-old at the back, on sale. There’s a hundred people in the village and every morning eighty-two of them line up to buy bread. The ones who saved money from their paychecks, or from their mother’s housekeeping money, or inherited ( Read more... )

This speech may be listened to or read (or both, if you're feeling ambitious!). The written version is a close, but not exact, transcription.

Listen here.

* * *

‘Can’t’ means ‘won’t’ and ‘won’t’ means pushups.

I say that on the first day of circus class.

I say it to nine-year-olds.

I say, we’re not here to quit. We’re here to be amazing.

And when ( Read more... )