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A cult is one thing; it defies common sense that a commonly educated person cannot escape cultist thinking and belonging. That cult, A.A., is girded by police, fire, therapy, hospitals, insurance companies, and courts.
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Digging in another garden, jumping into another space and time, I impaled a toad on the tines of a garden fork. At first I thought the toad was a clump of clay, stuck to the thick tine, but before I could kick the clay off with my…
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Mosaics are a trick of the eye, seeming
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1258108
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The first night I met her we slow danced to George Strait songs for most of the evening and when we took a break, our talking went warm and well as we sat eating hot dogs and sipping beers until she dropped a couple of bombs, first, telling me she was married and then, that…
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Margaret will take her seven away from his raging Irish hammers slurry Saturday night honks smashing red eyes. They'll board a secret train countryside bound where they sing the songs of her own dead Mam who lived poor in the world but…
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Johnny puts another whiskey in front of me. Except for him, me, and Petey, the bar's empty. "You hear about that up in Wilmette?" he asks."No, what?" I say."A cougar. People say they saw a cougar.""Bullshit.""No shit. Was in the Sun Times this morning.""Sun Times ain't…
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1597102
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I never pulled it off, never rode an atom through a super collider with a nose full of cocaine and a drink in my hand. Never was a bullet, zooming through the city, skin pressed to bone, nerves on fire. Never was an atom bomb, ever-exploding in slow motion, ripping off…
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as I imagine only you canyou're the ocean on fire before anyone else hasbroken that ancient seal, or simply taken the first icy plunge.You can eatall the bitterfruit there is, but that stilldoesn't make theworld a more hatefulplace. Only people…
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The tiny green light flashing in the lawn of an apartment building one night that caught Roberta’s attention while we were walking home from Café Vita.
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The story goes that the night before I was born my dad had a terrible headache.
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She looks for the obit, can't find. Over and over, looks. Nothing. Nothing except something touching her shoulder. Follow me. Corridors, doors, along and along, no time to notice that this last is the stage door — she was so suddenly there in the blare and…
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The river waited for her patiently.
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1806107
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People do want to be kind. It's just that sometimes they need a little push (or, in a few cases, a big fat shove) in the right direction.
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1693109
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Sometimes, they beat their masters home...
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Charlie Hancock missed the bus. Started walking.
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Her preferred post-coital activity is to pant, to suck in air with urgent greed.
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Jake goes back inside, turns on the TV, and sits down. It is the end of the world! A lane of the Bay Bridge has fallen into the bay. A building downtown has lost its skin.
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Do you want an ass mi Nina Bonita? I buy you jeans that work like a Miracle Bra for your behind.
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Words are looking ever so strange today
like a hole in space
a wind in a cloud
a face superimposed over a mountain
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"What say we adjourn to the bedroom and I give you a little demonstration of sexual acrobatics?”
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1070106
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2008Not a bubble burstbut a trust ruptured.The guilty don't survivebut, rather, thrive. 2011The monied are superior.They game the system well.As we work harder, longer,their paper fortunes swell.2017Marie and Louie were monied once.The Romanovs as well.Fast as blades and…
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It's been twenty years since you left. I should call it a day.Even the Obeah woman said as much. But I don't listen. Instead I sit with old and proper ethnic widows in black, waiting for your return. One of them translates my story for the…
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1531108
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nothing can stop a group of genteel Southern women from a card game, and divine intervention makes one's participation in such an event quite worthwhile
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I don't need to be toldhow natural you are, not here.I'm reminded every singletime I open my eyes.What I want to know iswhere have you gone? Whyhas it taken you so verylong to return? But Iknow the answer. You aresomewhere fighting for your dearlife. It's what we all do--in…
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Sometimes after bookbinding for a few hours at the hand-sewing table, Jillie would, after scraping her knife too roughly over the glue of an old book's spine, feel not like a resurrector of literature, as she should, but a killer. Not a calculating or
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17151010
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Bob’s thoughts drift back to bird, the solitary creature in the field, dignified, unhurried, waiting. Bob wonders where he goes; surely he will move on when spring gives way to summer.
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“I have a theory,” she said on their first date, which was at an Indian restaurant where the music was a lovely singsong but the chef seemed enraged as he clapped a ball of dough between his hands, then threw it into the flames. And her date, whom she…
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A crash, a loud tear screams through the house. A coffee table continues its dutiful life as a bitch.
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