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I remember being sent a picture once from one of my old roommates, Louise, back in Chicago where I came from. The photo was taken when she’d come out for a visit to California. In the picture I am sitting on the front stairs of my house in the Rockridge
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Over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house they went, Will and his new girlfriend Emma from Atlanta for the annual family dinner and drunken disaster in Allendale.
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Five o’clock, and Madame choosing her evening legs. Elizabeth assisting. Elizabeth will continue to assist until midnight, despite the chaos, at which point the authorities will tell her such assistance is no longer necessary.
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...She smells like Mentholadium all the time which is one of them old lady smells. When I get up there, she says, “I’ll scrub the bee jesus out of you little girl,” and by God, I have a purty good bath that day.
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And you should know, every woman smiles at a man buying flowers, because … we can imagine. We can only hope.
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my crotch-heavy press of 'Yes.'
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The first days of October are ordinary in the way that milk just hours away from spoiling is ordinary milk. You can baptise your cornflakes with it, but part of you knows the whole thing is just shy of almost right.
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A drag queen thrown from the mechanical bull Thursday night is my fault, they say, they meaning management. And because of the ensuing brouhaha and the ambulance and the medics and a thousand flannel shirts straining for a look, I failed to pick up Jenny, my six-year-old…
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Roger's assigned route had him picking up medical waste at most of the plastic surgery offices in town. He smelled it on his skin by the end of the day. The plastic surgery places were less of a hassle than the hospital and worlds away from the free c
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It is a dark and stormy night, naturally
We’re trying to get some sleep
at a Travelodge in Eureka
when I get up at 3 a.m. to write
“Hard motel pillow receives snoring from neighboring room”
O Thesaurus, we need another word
Maybe it sh
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We all have friends that would drop everything to save us. It’s the times we don’t need help that they’re not nearly as attentive.
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The air has its dark confessional, and I have mine. Hot is called raw by some, hate mixed with malice for others. I am only separated by this dark window of time from you, but you never feared the lovely or the lonely.
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I loved you with the heaviness of crushed knives
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“Oh yeah?" I said to Stendhal. "I found six references to women's eyebrows in Travels in the South of France. That's all you think about!”
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A black and white Malamute chasing down a deer
to the edge of the water, and putting her mouth
on it. The hurt deer fallen into the water to escape.
Red blood floating out into the water like cloth.
The boy racing down the slope into the reeds t
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Gert sat in the car and wiped at the inside of the window while the defroster blasted at full strength. The shards and slivers of ice that networked across the windshield were just thick enough to hinder visibility. Bane wrenched the door open and shoved
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When someone asks me what I do, I tell them that I am a fixer. I fix things. There is nothing that cannot be fixed. Will it ever be as good as new? That is subjective, but I will fix it for you.
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I am alive, and I am hungry. Angry, I want more. I am not content with what you're offering me. Forty hours a week, two weeks vacation. A mortgage and car payments. Wife and kids, a dog in the suburbs. It's all incredibly unexciting, unsatisfying.
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Saturday night in the suburbs west of Boston. As Pancho Sanza and I drift wearily from one upscale restaurant to another, we see an endless parade of husbands whose indifference to their wives borders on cruelty.
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The building ejects my condominium like an enormous videocassette.
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Jacob could tell it was a man he had just walked past, a broken man with an olive green Vietnam era military jacket, a man who had probably served his country as honorably as anyone chosen at lottery and forced to kill for a subsistence wage…
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Beautiful boy! I am doomed / to have attended your presence; / time consumes us, but you / have changed so little...
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You hold me now, and pay attention.
Everything is new.
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“How long you been waiting around?” he asks as he pockets my soggy ten-dollar bill.
“For a jump or break in life?” I ask.
He smirks. “I hear that.”
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Every year at the orphanage, a new trend sprouted fully grown from a Sears Christmas catalog, and even though our belief in Santa Claus was dashed early on, we still loved the season because it meant a Paint by Number, Pogo stick, Hula Hoop or whatever…
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A Being of Aether, who having appeared to me one morning, instructed me in the geometry of thorns. She seemed to be semi-infinite as her often melodious speaking voice was unimaginable in one direction and limited in another.
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One day when they were sitting on the curb together at 4th Street and Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa and Joe was calling out to passers by in a singsong voice, “Spare change for cigs,” she had persuaded them that they should try to join the circus.
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And by God he made it to heaven! St. Peter waved him on in...
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I came to a field where, scattered around, were quite a few men digging holes
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“I’m pregnant,” he says...
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