Halsted M. Bernard

If you are read­ing this, you have been infected. Pro­ceed to the Well­ness Cen­ter. At the door, remove the piece of cloth­ing you like best. This cer­tainly car­ries the dis­ease, and will be destroyed.
No one will greet you. There is no one staffing the Well­ness Cen­ter in this time of cri­sis; all …

A pile of hopes, socks just out of the dryer,
top a new year. That is fine, but every­one
wants you to be care­ful to match the socks.
I am not care­ful. I am tired of being care­ful.
I throw love at you, and it could hit you in the face.
It is tir­ing to be loved hap­haz­ardly, I know.
Some­one …

She thought that it would be enough when they had to reg­is­ter as no-gods, when they divided the line between types of belief. She never thought it would come to enforced ster­il­iza­tion. What was once a prac­tice they so read­ily embraced as “choice” was now a manda­tory med­ical pro­ce­dure for all no-gods at …

I hadn’t thought of you in a while, and
right when I saw the lanky brunette
swivel side­ways in her plas­tic seat
to let some­one out, I thought of you,
your skin and hair and bones,
so taut and shiny. You were the
epit­ome of “girl” in my world and if
I had a crush on you –
    we all did …

These words are mer­ce­nar­ies.
They slouch out­side the back door of this poem,
clouds of frosty air bil­low­ing around their heads,
belts and boots glint­ing in the flood lamp.
When it is time, these words slip inside,
car­ry­ing a box or a knife or an enve­lope.
The hall­way is dim. The recip­i­ent waits.
A noise, half-sigh, half-groan, escapes.
Per­haps noth­ing hap­pened. The …

He puts his head on his hand, elbow beside the yel­low pages. He scans the names and num­bers, paus­ing to smirk at a funny bunch of let­ters. Today the book is of Reno, Nevada. He has never been to Reno, but he pic­tures it like Orinda in July, only flat­ter. Once …

Per­haps the most use­ful aspect of a workshop—more use­ful than the cri­tiques, which are often all over the map—is the irre­place­able and salu­tary ter­ror of pub­lic per­for­mance. Putting up a piece before a work­shop is in effect pub­lish­ing it, and the work­shop offers many new writ­ers their first expo­sure to the very best teach­ing tool, …

My writer’s block-busting exer­cise becomes a block in itself when I want to write stan­dard “hey this is what’s in my head” entries. So here goes with one of those, long over­due.
For the past few weeks, no small amount of my spare brain-cycles have been spent focus­ing on the ques­tion of what I do …

I apol­o­gize for the lack of posts this week. On Mon­day I had a king-sized headache, and on Tues­day I took pho­tographs instead.
Back to our regularly-scheduled bust­ing of writer’s block! This prose poem is cour­tesy of my spam folder.
“Too busy to go back to school?” she huffed, dan­gling the high­ball glass between thumb and …

“Hello? O, hi, Cheryl. No, I’m not busy, just work­ing on the kids’ bed­room at the moment. You know, the same old thing, cat walked through and wrecked the whole left edge. I don’t know what I’m sup­posed to do with what I’m given, Cheryl. I just don’t know. You know Stan, always promis­ing …