Eight poems you won’t soon forget. Poems you’ll want to read again and again. Each reading reveals new layers, depths, insights, poetic visions, and an overwhelming desire to understand the heart and the mind of a true poet. Missing Fold, collapse, telescope. How piercing glows a ray — if The star rolls round once every so many Forevers while night falls daily? So cold to hope, In an ice age, for global warming As streams Grow stiff, Like a bay leaf, Harden, Fossilize, like a trope, Like the uncanny Flower that buds more Slowly than Death blooms — so, grow wild, bow, garden. How real are dreams If even after brainstorming One can hardly recall one or Forget disbelief Again? ~ ~ Divine Dream I often wonder why my dreams so seldom Remember me in…
“The Sixty-Five Percent”
An Excerpt From Derrick Lafayette’s Kaleidoscope: Dark Tales We continue to celebrate the publication this new collection of stories by Derrick R. Lafayette, published this week by Fictional Cafe Press. It’s five short works and a novella, each as different and original and evocative as can be. You’ve never read anything quite like these – well, a close perhaps if you’ve read Robert Coover. Here is an excerpt from Derrick’s story, “The Sixty-Five Percent” to tantalize you into buying a copy of his book – which we’ll be announcing at any moment. Come on, Ingram, Come on, Amazon, let’s go! “It’s filthy down here,” Abbot complained, hunching his body into the sewer pipe. A rivulet of brown water soaked his socks. Insects of unknown origin slithered above him. He adjusted his lab coat, pulled up…
“Kaleidoscope: Dark Tales” by Derrick R. Lafayette
Just Published: A Provocative Short Story Collection by Our Own Writer-in-Residence It’s Valentine’s Day and Publication Day for Kaleidoscope: Dark Tales, Derrick R. Lafayette’s newest book. AND we’re excited to anounce Kaleidoscope as our first Fictional Café Press book of 2023. Derrick is a prolific writer who was our Fiction Writer-in-Residence for 2021-2022. He’s had several works published here at the Café, which you can read here. (Several are included in his collection but others are exclusive FC publications.) As the French author Marcel Proust once remarked, the mind evokes endlessly changing thought patterns, much like a kaleidoscope. And so reading Derrick R. Lafayette’s Kaleidoscope: Dark Tales, a genuinely extraordinary collection of five short stories and a novella, is like seeing the world anew through bits of colored glass. Here’s a preview. What if . ….
“The Man Who Was Thursday” by G.K. Chesterton
“The Man Who Was Thursday” is a 1906 detective thriller masterpiece by G.K. Chesterton is brought to life in this fully dramatized radio play adaptation. Poet Gabriel Syme goes undercover in the nightmare world of terrorist anarchists set to destroy humanity. He must infiltrate and dismantle the dreadful Council of Days led by the all-powerful President Sunday. Gabriel Syme confronts anarchist Lucien Gregory giving a speech. After an argument, Gregory tempts Gabriel to join him in an underground meeting of anarchists and the election to select a new Thursday on the council of Days. Our detective goes undercover as Thursday in the anarchist Council of Days. He is introduced to their leader, the powerful and frightening President Sunday. Barely escaping the council meeting unscathed, Gabriel is followed through the streets of London by a decrepit…
“Café Chimera”
A Short Story by Bill Suter Fictional Café may be getting upstaged by the goings-on at Café Chimera, and that’s a good thing. Calvin yawned, barely functional, as the road crew shuffled into the cafe before their morning rounds. He needed a path back to the land of the living, but this muddy cup of coffee wasn’t helping matters. “Too strong?” the server asked. “Chewy, but it will do.” “I’m sorry. I’m new here.” “Yeah,” he forced a smile, “I can tell.” “I could always cast a spell over it,” she suggested. “I’m better at that.” “Beer flavored?” He forced another smile in spite of himself. “Elderberry,” she said brightly. “It’s already in the syrup on your pancakes. I just need to activate it.” She gently waved a hand over his plate and stepped back…
Deux Poèmes from Deux Poets
Today, Fictional Café introduces two fine poems from two fine American poets in our virtual magazine. Please let us know what you think of their work in the Comments section at the end of this post. Frank De Canio Language Primer I might as well become a child again, since my substantial English goes as far as what my senorita comprehends. As such, my native tongue becomes a bar against pronounced exchanges with my friend. She understands enough of what I say to stumble through the meaning I intend, but not enough for me to get my way. Yet, speaking fluent Spanish to her peers, she leaves me feeling witless in my age, while she with rapid fluency endears herself to those in the proficient stage of verbal mastery. And I must wait on textbook…
Robert Lunday’s Poetic Moments
Little Man I need what I earn and could use a little more. But the little man in me needs none of it. He squats like an undiscovered arthropod and bottom-feeds on my mutterings. He sits in the position known as Lotus with his knees at forty-five degrees. The supposed virtues are his zodiac and if he’s naked you try not to notice. Fragment Please believe in me and do not doubt what I say. This foaming mouth is Aphrodite but the hands are Hephaestus clawing the air as he falls through the heavens in dismay. You break my heart but I take the pieces and make from each a thousand more. Gravel Gravel was on the menu. It was the thing you weren’t supposed to eat. It was there to make everything else look…
“Man Does Not Live By Words Alone”
Poetry by Dana Yost Rainbow Through the window the sun blew into a glass of white wine then refracted into a rainbow upon the skin of lemon-pepper chicken as we talked about Nazi death camps and soldiers killed by sniper fire in Vietnam. A teacher dead in the recent derecho. It was such a peaceful setting for death, wasn’t it? The seven of us around the table and one finally mentioned amnesty for draft-dodgers, and no one went berserk, no one even disagreed. We shook our heads at the insanity of war, at the cruelty of death, and my classmate posted photos on Facebook of herself in hospice, ready to die from cancer. “I’ll be here for the end,” she said from her living room couch, under a blanket. I looked for a rainbow but…
“Oz 9” by Shannon Perry
Welcome back Fictional Cafe Listeners, up next we have “Oz 9” by Shannon Perry. On an otherwise unexceptional Tuesday in 2042, Gated Galaxies fired off 400 of its Oz 8000™ ships, each with 50,000 “resting guests” tucked into stasis pods, plus a skeleton crew of up to half-a-dozen total no-hopers. It was a win-win for G2, as they’re known, as the Oz 8000 model was about to be declared “unfit for journeying to the nearest 7-Eleven, much less interstellar space” and recalled. G2 had a very large fleet of the 8000s, and a slight head start on the recall, as they’d paid off the head inspector to delay her report by promising the ships would be stripped and sold for parts. Instead, the ships were spit-shined, outfitted with some black market YugoPods™, and space aboard quietly…
“Paper Dolls” by Rachel Gonzalez
A Short Story by Our New Writer in Residence He has a collection of paper dolls and a workshop dedicated to them. It’s a perfectly maintained and organized room filled with tools of his trade. Xacto knives and self-healing mats, tacky spray for stubborn pages, creasing tools for the ideal line. There are no unruly folds or crinkled edges in his workshop. He’s a sentimental man. His favorite paper dolls live in a box on the highest shelf. Sometimes he pulls them out to admire them, or to take inspiration for his newest project. His process is very thorough: First comes the raw material. He can spot the potential of a page from a mile away. Be it the pattern or the texture or the pliability, he knows a good page when he gets his…