Louis E. Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in the Slidell/LaCombe area, as well as East New Orleans on Bayou Sauvage. 
In 1996 he earned a B.A. from Louisiana State University in English and in 2002 was the first graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program 
in creative writing. He has published translations, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and interviews in over two hundred magazine and journals in North America, 
Europe, and Asia. In 2004, he was the winner of the University of Milwaukee’s Cream City Review’s poetry contest for his poem “The Shed: 
The Daughter of Shadows Speaks from Max Beckmann’s The Dream (1921).” Other awards include The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Common Ground Review’s 
poetry award, an Excellence Award from the Dana Literary Society, three Editor’s Choice Awards, four Pushcart nominations, as well as an artist grant 
from the Mississippi Arts Commission.  Bourgeois’ books include, Through the Cemetery Gates, The Distance of Ducks, The Animal, Cora Falling Off the Face of the Earth, 
White Night, Fragments of a Life Thirty-two Years Gone, OLGA and a forthcoming collection of short prose, The Gar Diaries. Bourgeois is also co-founder and editor of VOX, 
an independent experimental literary journal based in Oxford, Mississippi.  


 

Apotemnophilia

He is strange to the extent that he would prefer to be his dog’s teeth rather than himself.  
He would like to kill himself but he doesn’t know how.  He can’t understand his caged 
birds and this sometimes leads him to masturbate; he doesn’t understand his sperm and 
this leads him to cut himself all over with an extremely heavy and sharp knife.

He asked his doctor to amputate all his limbs and the doctor said he wouldn’t perform such an operation.  
Nowadays, he spends all his time stalking good looking amputees, male, female, or otherwise.


Apt Pupil

My Master read the sonnet I wrote for the day’s lesson.  He shook his fist at me like a fool and turned all red in the face, 
as if the poem was poisoning him.  He said, STICK TO THE REAL!!!  That was the last straw.  
I told him I’d rather believe in God than be loyal to the Real.  He took a swing at me and 
I reached into my gunny sack and came up with a thick bladed knife and stabbed him in the neck.  
He fell down hard on the sand and died after a few minutes of heavy panting.

I took my notebook out of his clinched fist and left him in the desert for the buzzards and coyotes.

As I walked away from my dead Master, I felt light and overwhelmed with Intelligence and Joy.