1509 18 14
|
I peel off my shorts and tee-shirt, step out of my shoes, and crawl into bed. She wakes up then. "Oh, my goodness," she says.
|
1693 18 9
|
Jesus will walk on the water.
Judas will walk on a technicality.
|
946 18 14
|
His eyes are wide then narrow and brown. Hers are gray then they look away, toward the back door where a delivery driver has walked in, carrying a tray. Nothing is going to happen today.
|
1463 18 13
|
—Was it true, what you wrote in that poem?
—Pretty true.
—What do you mean “pretty true”? Was it true or wasn’t it?
—It was as close as you get to truth in poems.
|
1129 18 8
|
Jesus is for sale. But he’s heavy.
|
1629 18 16
|
|
1087 18 8
|
The cloudless sky/
amplifies the incompletion,/
clarifies the imperfections/
of the night’s normalcy-
|
1353 18 12
|
|
1304 18 17
|
Johan was telling stories about the occupation. The Germans were stupid, he said.
|
1431 18 17
|
Soon, she will turn to liquid
|
883 18 9
|
Each day, I lose more words-/
nouns and verbs- but especially//
proper names. People and places
|
1414 18 3
|
|
1467 18 4
|
At night, I fold your name in origami doves and blow, hard, and you are disassembled come morning.
|
1502 18 12
|
Go to your room. Children are meant to be seen not heard.
|
2171 17 11
|
She is cutting his hair. The wind is in her curls. She rises and falls like a sleeping animal. He has removed his shirt. There is a towel around his neck, the smell of spice and banana, the scent of vacations. You are reminded of the time in the beach house in Florida…
|
1315 17 13
|
She lies on her stomach by the side of the pool staring into her towel. On her back, I can make out a pastel isthmus, surgery's pink art or charlatan's scab, I can't tell which. She is beautiful as rare roast beef is beautiful.
|
214 17 10
|
Whenever my mother’s will-to-live wavered and her hand reached out for the electric fence, my ash would whisper, “Live, live.”
|
1386 17 10
|
Some idiot was gonna let a snake eat him. I know, but I saw it on the internets. That's some dumb-assed stuff right there. Everyone knows about snakes. The Jesus book tells us all about them, inside us, slithering through ruby-red and eating our guilt from inside out.…
|
1999 17 14
|
my foreign mouth embarrassed the teachers. my jumbled words gave people sad faces. so wrong these words of mine. even the mentally retarded girl would not talk to me. just looking at my garbled mouth made her slap herself. and my writing. oh no. my writin
|
1514 17 11
|
I fired God today. He wasn't showing up for work, slept through meetings, wrote ambiguous memos and killed too many innocents. Things just weren't working out.
|
1122 17 9
|
A young girl wavering between celibacy and punk mother-lust despair came to visit us each night
|
1386 17 10
|
The leaves are telegrams sent from the branches to the wind, saying, “it's over stop don't send kisses stop forget me.”
|
1521 17 12
|
|
1552 17 7
|
Since the divorce had gone final, the matter settled once and for all, he’d taken to a masochistic bingo of sorts.
|
1811 17 9
|
I have been mother
to a hundred soldiers,
holding their hands
barely knowing
their names
|
1755 17 12
|
"If Hillary can forgive Bill, why can't you forgive Dad?" my seven-year-old son wails one night as I put him to bed.
|
1891 17 12
|
The sea dies where a cello torques on sand, leaving me without its compass. An old clock sings.
|
830 17 9
|
The cornbread for dressing cools./
The cranberries boil with one cup each/
of sugar and water. The aromas are nice
|
1065 17 10
|
Another new spring and the leaves
|
1202 17 8
|
When I was young and self-born in religion my aunts, uninterested in being washed in the Blood of Christ, called me Preacher Boy. I didn't pay them any attention. It was fine by me, I said, if they wanted to sit around and paint their toenails . . .
|