She asks me to tell her a story. Almost every night she can’t sleep. I’m no storyteller, I’ll say, and at first I would start off with robots and fantastic bears, trying to make my own Where the

Death in the Family

my car scraped you and your bike alongside the highway,

in the grade below me over at the public high school
edged off the median at just the wrong second I

Mathematics IIIIIIIIIII

A miracle trapped in a fur coat. A fur coat trapped in its original body.

Mathematically speaking, the body is made up of four essential parts: the arms, the ideas,

I am driving through the hill country when I spot up ahead, in the dip between two hills, this young buck with his thumb out, sleeveless, flaunting the white underside of a supple tanned bicep

I was wearing white lipstick when I pressed a kiss onto the dirty window in the back corner of his mother’s garage, pasting spider silk and bone-colored dust to the glass. I left that mark to be

Polyphase Signals

I sit in the morning garden
slick
from last night’s rain

ants run in circles
across
the iron table   except

for one   perched on the
lip
of my Mother’s

Founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America’s best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. 

Lance Olsen is the author of twelve novels, one hypertext, five nonfiction

I dream of seeing your beautiful face somewhere other than in the familiar expressions captured in photographs on the internet

I spend my free time an appropriate amount of bed sick. I keep a lot of spare pieces of glass up my carpeted self. I mean a literal debris of glass happens when I sit forward.

Essay On The Theory of Motion

You remember reading a poem once about a boy driving his grandmother to the library across town. Someone said that the car is a perfect device for giving a poem

I stayed in the monastery for a month to read the entire Bible in the Luther translation in German. My reward was that every evening, I would get a pint of ale that the monks made right there, and it came from large rotting oak barrels, which enhanced the flavor. After Gregorian chants, prayers, and then a couple of halb-liter, the monks were pretty close to God.

The girl you spent a whole summer watching Beverly Hills 90210 and eating McDonald’s lunches with ran up behind you, taking hold of your backpack.

I ran into myself at the grocery store the other day. The store had just run out of Cookie Crisp cereal. The worst part was that I'd gone to the store specifically to get the cereal, along with

The Doctor’s Office

is windowless. He asks me to undress—You can wear this. He places a large white bird wing in my lap. It’s winter. I’m holding gloves. Then he’s back and I’m lying on the

POSTCARD

It is just beautiful –
the waves look like nothing

and the stars

choke on the air.

VARIOUS DISTANCES

I still can see you,
on the steps without
a

I start working in the bakery because I think of it as romantic. I count each sugared donut while composing hypothetical letters to past lovers – half-invented, half-remembered.

Last night was

Another dry day, so I build my wall—cinderblocks delivered to my driveway— and another house for sale sign comes down and the new neighbors, like the old, watch as I build a cinderblock wall around

I thought it was a baby. It was possible, though not—and this is the important part—likely. 

tracy

what if i opened my mouth and a swarm of bees just, you know. the weather said it might rain, and i was like, 'okay.' this is thinking about tracy. that's like, a city somewhere, in the

I made this when my dad and stepmom came to visit. I also made it for Scott’s parents and kids. I guess those are called my in-laws and stepchildren now. It’s a real “crowd-pleaser”!!! 

I Wrote a Eulogy for What We Used to Be

I sank into
what seemed like an endless abyss
of blue distraught and infinite sadness;
I realized I had no way of feeling like I'd be loved by you

Icon

you have a room in your apartment just for painting pictures.

you sleep on the floor next to your computer and iPhone. the iPhone is almost in your mouth.
it smells like old

A relationship’s complacency can only end atop the stripped sinew of an erect Doogie Howser. We’re not gonna hide at being perfect.

Before I was fired from Pinnacle Heating & Air, my boss had me drive to Limon to pick up the most expensive heat pump on the market at his other store.  I almost felt bad for the guy he was

I towed my worldly goods to a remote plot with real snakes in the grass, real primroses near pathways, and I wasn’t a tisket-a-tasket girl running errands but an adult with a narrow skill set that had sent me toward serial opportunities, jobs, my career not careering but ascendant as I checked off items on widely circulated how-to lists, but no one could tell me how to succeed at love. 

HOMILY

In a world this red & watery, I have no choice but to be a wild animal waiting to be killed.  These laddered roses stacked atop my chest, all these decisions filled with blood.  My