The instant you remember gratitude with enough focus to spring free its power...

The falling may continue// forever.

The truth about the bird and the snake is this. They are dead. And me? I cannot stop thinking about them.

For two days, I bashed out words with grimacing fingers, wrenching images from my whining consciousness – a weak, lumbering, uninspired piece – and now for what?

Matilda went wild at sixty-five. Legs left unshaven for the first time in fifty years, hair still and proud, knotted with forgetting. She’d roam the streets at night, a traveler without design. Matilda was a gardener of sorts, digging up all previous assu

I am the marigold wheel no one can understand, the menace your grandfather warned you about. Yes, yes, that last phrase was overkill...

We laugh at them, parading two-by-two, the elephants rolling tail to trunk across the makeshift gangplank, wide slats flexing under their sway. A pair of snakes contemplates gulping a pair of frogs and their clandestine movements stun a cricket and his mate. Birds squat…

Earlier that morning a tree in the yard had filled with starlings, and on the way home after lunch, the sky held planes that looked like starlings, floating together.

If they are all speaking medicine & I / start speaking French - how / rude am I? Would they understand then / what it is to be entirely left out / of the conversation, unseen?

I don't think you understand. A sad boy doesn't just die inside, slowly, he becomes withdrawn from certain types of lovely youthful reasoning out loud, accustomed to feeling what is expected, graded, just to be allowed to survive another…

You snore and the house is safe again.

Regret takes the shape of little clouds ...

The summer I was eleven years old....

When they talk, they put their hands like a cup around their mouth

I envisioned bound feet of ancient Asian women who wore embroidered slippers that hid grotesque disfigurements.