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Booking, 29 June 2026

June 19, 2026
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Booking, 19 June 2026

Every so often a book title joke floats by…

The Crack in the Sidewalk by Ava Neiss-Tripp (illustrated by C. U. Nicks-Fall)

But now this fastidious brain demands a plot, so let’s cook one up.

Joe dragged his feet, or anyway didn’t lift them enough. He was inventive enough to imagine a device that would help him avoid sidewalk cracks, and before he knew it he had had shoes made with toe cameras and imminent-crack-detection AI, and so he heard an alarm-sound when a crack candidate was two steps away. At the same time, in the same city, an equally inventive Molly Siefer Coddle, similarly crack-trip-prone, solved the problem with compressed-air footlifting-assist tech, and a geneticist named Noh Pronouns published a paper describing a modification to the human genome that would make humanity more graceful. Then a materials engineer perfected “the sidewalk of the future,” which had self-healing cracks. Two months later there was an extinction event, so there was no one around to trip over sidewalk cracks, which evolved sentience, and the wise cracks lived happily ever after, cracking each other up with stupid-human jokes.

Next time you stroll on a sidewalk, remember: if you step on them, you won’t trip on them.

shave

June 15, 2026
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shave

disposable razor at the ready/gushing water warming/the old man blearily splashes his face/and fills his hand with gooey gel/and rubs his hands together/and rubs the goo al over his face

the foliage has spread down to his throat/and up to his upper cheekbones/and it is more bristly/more slice-resistant/yet still hasn’t filled in/still makes him loirsok like a candidate/for the drunk tank/if he lets it abide for three days or more

he rinses the slather off his hands/starts at the sideburn wannabe on the left/slaloms down the dizzy-gillespied cheek to the knot at the clenched jaw/and beyond

zambonis his left neck up to the jawline/cenerslices from larynx to chin/zambonis the right neck/then up the face over the puffed right cheek/to the other quasimodo sideburn/and then skates around right cheek and left/feeling with his non-razor hand/for random rogue hairs

now the under chin/with its special jowl-sector problems/requiring taut stretching of the sagflesh/and several special swipes

the chin has a tricky grain requiring up down&sideways/and the underlip is a mutant jungle/needing micro-machetes

now it is time for mustache removal/with the worst hairs catching and snagging the blade/and inflicting little wounds over the lip

the mouthcorners/pushed from within by the tongue/ seem so often to have ONE recalcitrant hair/that refuses to release its follicular grip

at long last the faceflesh is smooth

he likes to wipe the remaining foam off his face with his vanity towel/it looks so cool in the movies when the rugged hero does it/but it yields a gummy soap-residue towel/so he splashes and splashes it off

then the towel and the bits of toilet paper to stanch the tiny wounds

“see you tomorrow” he says to his reflection

emit a nopu ecno

June 11, 2026
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emit a nopu ecno

the frustrated prince

hurled the slipper

forcibly into

the brick and mortar of the castle wall.

it would have shattered

had not his vizier

slowed its flight

with time-slice magic

and plucked the slipper from the wall

before

it more than bent with the impact.

the prince brightened with an idea.

“use your magic to reverse time

back to the party and her in my arms

but let me keep my memory of now.”

“that i cannot do,” said the vizier.

“time may be slowed, or sped,

but what is done cannot be undone.”

the prince growled.

then he brightened again.n

“speed me up, then.

make me so fast

that I can search my kingdom

dwelling by dwelling

and be gone before anyone sees me.”

“majesty,” said the vizier,

“i could do that, but think it through.

your subjects deserve dignity

and privacy. your search

would shatter their privacy,

would destroy their dignity,

while you feasted your eyes.”

there was a silence.

the prince’s face looked

like a gathering storm. at last he said calmly,

“well, but after all, they are MY subjects.

slow time for me. now.”

with an inscrutable face

the vizier put his hands to his temples

and spoke an incantation

in a long-dead language. “prince,

it is done. time outside you will slow

from hardly at all to stock-still

depending on how fast you move. do not

go faster than a brisk walk.” he paused

and then said with some bleakness,

“farewell.”

the prince grinned lasciviously

and vanished from the vizier’s sight.

“if he follows my instruction, he will live,”

the vizier mused. but he will not.”

as if on cue,

there were screams from the greensward

not fifty feet beyond the castle’s drawbridge.

the charred form and burning raiment

of the prince of the realm

had suddenly popped into existence

near a group of villagers.

the vizier went up to the battlements

for a proper view. “he couldn’t wait,

the lustful knave.

he ran,

and became like unto falling star,

burned by the air

that flensed him as he sped.”

he sighed.

“we are better off without him.”

he allowed himself a playful smile.

“well, after all,

there was always

too much friction

between us.”

scrap

June 8, 2026
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to not remember much of a day

is to have a scrap

of memory. to wrestle

with decaying memory is to have a scrap

with the second law of therm

odynamics. to knock an e

off a scrape is to have a scrap. if you

don’t care for th

e ran

domeness of this mess

let us cons

ign it to the scrapheap

of non-history, which viewed

through a mag

nif

i

er

is a lovely

crazy

quilt of chao

s.

broth and bhoy

June 2, 2026
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Beef broth, orange and yellow peppers, diced sweet onion, stew meat,Yukon Gold mini-potatoes, coarse kosher salt, fine-ground black pepper

one hour on high and the potatoes were still hard and woody. two and a half hours and the onion was caramelized and the potatoes were softish but firm.

with each successive bowl the broth became more agreeable. even the meat softened and chewing ceased to be a chore.

the ingested broth is becoming a part of me. of course it became non-broth as i ate it; became an acidic slurry and was enzymed and shunted over finger like absorbers,

and its warmth dissipated delightfully, euphorically;

and a search was sent to my brain;

broth. comic books.

and it turns out that in the comic book

Fantastic Four

Stan Lee

had an Irish doorman think about Ben Grimm,

The Thing,

some wistfulness including the phrase

“…what a fine

broth of a bhoy

he would be.”

even in my tweens,

though i loved comics and read them voraciously,

i thought Stan’s characterization of the doorman

hackneyed, a rather god-awful caricature.

the storytelling was superb, though,

thanks to the plot-assists of illustrator Jack Kirby.

..

I have digested the broth to the extent

that i am now partly former broth,

and have integrated the search

within my pop-culture continuity,

and so now am ready to face the day

with a bhoyish smile.

wombwater revisited (first incarnation)

June 1, 2026
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once upon trochaic times

nelly floated in a sac

very like a uterus

wore a latex fetus suit

snorkeled-air umbilicus

saw just shadows and vague shapes

licked the slicks of nutrients

on the innards of the mask

(having had colonic flush

there’d be meconium)

..

five days passed in fetal bliss

nell hallucinated with

shades of blobbed angelic choirs

hallelujahing away

then bright light bedazzled her

with the sac forthwith unzipped

with the fetus suit split wide

hose-off in her unitard

..

“it’s a girl!” the tech exclaimed

“you’ve been billed,” the front desk said

nelly took the subway home

climbed the stairs and was reborn

failures

May 31, 2026
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there are dnfs

(dnfs stands for did not finish and a dnf can be devastating for a long-distance runner)

and on a report card the letter f is a failing grade

(the student of sufficient shame may also think of f for fool, for frustrated, for feeble-minded)

there are divorces and bankruptcies and estrangements and mass shootings

..

there are creative failures

but we can turn them into misfires if we try try again and pay attention to concept and execution

..

there are also melting glaciers

cardiac arrests

but the mother of all failures is cowardice

(failure of nerve)

and in this year and last we have borne witness to cowards in power cowed by a presidential coward who in turn kow-tows to a muscovite who has enthralled him

and this has engendered a failure of national enlightenment

the silencing of the voice of America

death and destruction abroad

and everlasting shame

..

but some few of us fight against and fight whole-heartedly

stansbury of new mexico

king of maine

schwartzenegger of california

valenzuela of washington state

..

so let’s not call a time of death on this beloved nation just yet

we have heroes

we have receipts

and we have fierceness where it counts

isogi, friends

there’s a snag or two

May 27, 2026
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there’s a snag or two

the toescape reveals unsmoothness

that may plague the sockwearer

curl his toes though he might

he is too old and fat

and his nails too impervious to clipping

to attempt trimming

when his out-the-door drop-dead deadline

is six minutes

so he bunches his sock down its shank

so his bunched toes touch sock-end

and he carefully unbunches sock up foot then leg

..

one snag or two avoided

and as he drives to work

he strategizes his imagined

conversation with his boss

who abhors criticism

yet behaves it a way that costs the company money

and her the respect of her subordinates

it will be a tricky navigation

akin to having a foot with eight toes

of which three toenails are jagged

and socks of a fabric a cousin to burlap

..

he smiles

and wraps his bunched eight toes

in silk handkerchiefing

pulls carefully

and coos at his unsnaggy strategy-sock

it will be smooth as well-whipped cake frosting

on a piece of cake

a trio of imperfectly

May 24, 2026
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a trio of imperfectly

peeled hard-boiled eggs

huddle in a potter’s bowl

where they will be fork-mashed and -hacked

to a unified mush to which will be added

store-brand mayonnaise in three dollops

and Plochman’s mustard in an air-forced squirt.

this condimented mush will lie

on a store-brand potato bread hot dog bun

and on this bed of food

thin-sliced roma tomato will be arrayed.

1% butterfat milk will be the beverage.

coffee with splenda and french vanilla dry creamer

will follow

as with a sauntering walk

to aid digestion.

fortified, medicated, dying

May 21, 2026
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fortified, medicated, dying

when i was a sickly little kid I was disinfected with an antibiotic bombardment

it killed even the good bacteria aiding digestion and so i was made to eat much more yogurt than I wanted

they also tried a sulfa-drug nasal eyedropper and different antihistamines and vitamin and iron supplements

i was vaporubbed and gammaglobulined and forbidden nighttime outdoor activity because, the allergist said, many plants germinate at night

and they put a dust precipitator in my room

and they put me in “adaptive p. e.” at school

and i was unhappy at all that freakifying treatment

i feel a whisper of humiliation to this day

but now it’s quite normal especially at my age to be encumbered with a daily schedule of several medications

so i fit right in with my atenolol and rosuvastatin and tamsulosin and metformin

..

but now i dislike fitting in

and though dying scares the crap out of me and i hate the very notion and I hope not to face the reaper for many years

there seems to be a creeping invasive notion

that there will be an upside to the end