The Japanese sun, blood-red and vibrant, like a Cézanne apple, was setting far away in the distance over the snow-capped peak of Mt. Fuji. For a moment, the intensity of the light blinded him. He could not see the road ahead. His front bicycle wheel wobb

It was in the early sixties when my mother discovered she was my father’s second wife. Four years before, they were married quickly, by a justice of the peace, because his transfer to the States had come through. He’d charmed her with his dark chocolate e

She seizes my hand. I resist just enough to sense her strength.

Estonia wore a liver milagro charm on a thin piece of rawhide around her neck and slept with her teeth in a jar. She was dreaming as she often did of the four children she conceived in Mexico. They had  been born in bright colors and dust. Her first child Nina…

Some of us, however, turn our secrets over in our souls, churning them with the fury of the howling winds of a January night. They are eroded and shaped and fine-tuned with the precision of a jeweler; the deeper and darker they are, the more brilliant of

"Tell me a story."

in dark recesses of this morgue of earth / where beauty of the good does not compel, / where evil's horrors seldom do repel— / Americ gods reign o'er from birth to birth.

I just can't figure out why nothing terrible happened to me that night. Young, blonde, drunk American girl sitting on a dirty curb in the red light district of Nuevo Laredo, and everyone left me alone ... amazing.

I suggested a threesome for her birthday. In jest, I thought. But here we are; me in my checkered Oxford, Katie in her red silk blouse, as planned. We're at this sushi place at the corner of 9th and Bentham. “Zuma.” I hate this restaurant, to tell you the…

If I came home and she had peed, even after I walked her in the morning before I left, I would tighten up my whole face and shoulders, so I wouldn't hit her, and I would grab her by the tags collar, and I would hiss at her what she needed to know, what sh

That’s right–Bob Dylan, ne Robert Allen Zimmerman–will be riding shotgun with me as we head north to fight the good fight against the Democratic Party’s war on women.

It was the end of a New York City summer, the heat and humidity thick all around. But in her body it was an unforgiving winter, the memory of pain always leaving her cold

Gone he is in his designated place Just resting in peace while I barely move on

My pain is a black pearl hidden in a clean shell.

The door flew open, hitting the wall, and the woman seated in the corner across from her pressed herself against the bench. Loretta saw that down through her petticoats came a trickle of yellow liquid, which pooled on the floor.