The Chapbook Lady
by Francis Levy

She’d identified herself as a poet when I first met her. It turned out we’d both liked that Dorothea Lasky poem “Porn” in The Paris Review. “I just watched a woman fuck a hired hand,” is one of the memorable lines. 

Louise was a friend of a friend of a friend, actually no, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, once removed with whom I was no longer speaking. I’d met the friend of a friend of a friend once removed at the party for Helen’s chapbook. After readings of pre-Perestroika Samizdat, we would retire to Ukrainian East, the dank basement place next to Veselka on Second Avenue. 

An Incident of Defenestration
by Francis Levy

The sound of her husband’s body hitting the mound of refuse wasn’t that much more dramatic than any of other occasional thumping that came from the dumpster, which contractors routinely used when there was a renovation going on.

Pet Buddha
by Francis Levy

No one paid attention to me. I was invisible. I was just one of those guys who spend their life filling out forms, paying bills, filing taxes on time for fear of being imprisoned, and dealing with the next minor emergency—the dead car battery, the leaking radiator that seemed to define the passage of my days.