1794 4 2
|
Flush, a sputter, and the water level rises, slowly. Flush again.
|
179394
|
Where I grew up, you did not venture casually into ocean waters.
|
179343
|
…Professor Wumbat begins.
|
1793177
|
The transformation in their domineering, sour mother revised her children’s memories of their childhoods.
|
179333
|
IN BOX 12 OF DD FORM 214, the Department of Defense requires a narrative reason for every military discharge. Mine reads: Continued involvement of a discreditable nature with civilian and military authorities.
|
179320
|
What the heck to believe in??
|
179353
|
When farming started in September, I thought of gambling, of my childhood best friend’s marriage ruined due to gambling, and of farming as a trope for living in the Midwest.
|
179363
|
The Operations Management Guru was visiting the twenty-fourth floor on Tuesday, and everyone at the company was wicked with fear.
|
17921413
|
|
17923013
|
I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.
|
179201
|
The soft twin winds
of peace and harmony
flow through your nipples
It is not milk
that gives such flow
but the whiff of life’s
spirit, the wind
of poetry
the renewal
and the silence
of the love
you give me
I suck like a new
|
179252
|
Jimmy wore a tie to top that torn green tee he toted every day, every other. He smelled of dirt, said he had a feeling we had watermelon somewhere since he caught a whiff from his room inside his house across the street.
|
179220
|
“We’re prisoners,” Sean reminded the guard. “Prisoners of your military.”
“You have never been treated as such.” Captain Hughes looked around the bar. “This festival is a celebration of you, of all of you. We pride ourselves on ou
|
179200
|
Sometimes Seattle's the next thing to heaven. The sky's diamond blue, the sun's a caress; your whole soul can breathe. You know what the shouting's about. But the sun quickly fades to Protestant gray and the gray last a long…
|
179251
|
in his thin, swanky
black leather jacket
out on the town at night
in Mexico with his girlfriend
|
179221
|
[CAUTION: "DISINTEGRATION OF THE FUNCTIONING PSYCHE," IS, APPARENTLY, A "DEEPLY PERSONAL" EXPERIENCE!"]
|
17922114
|
I don't want / to write about the body indulged, desires / denied, tortures invented, pleasures innate
|
179253
|
a beautiful cool quiet day
|
179121
|
The Bike Messenger on Lexington Avenue
Comes to rest
taking a moment
in the falling rain
slowly massaging the
veins at the top
of his bald head
Cracking his neck
while the yellow cabs start
honking behind him
Unwilling to mov
|
1791910
|
I knew I needed to visit a beach / made entirely of sharks’ teeth
|
17911613
|
Write a poem in which your father is a dog and you are his leash.
|
179165
|
We agreed I would go back up
to the cabin for another bottle.
|
1791128
|
In the office supply store on Union, Jeremy, the stock boy, shelves tubs of rubber bands. Tubs with an easy-access pop-top and a see-through container. If Hendy saw these tubs, she would think these particular rubber bands resembled anorexic gummy-worms,
|
179076
|
At noon on a weekday in the off season, when the trickle of tourists who wandered into the Mermaid Curio Shoppe had died out completely, she walked in with wet hair, leaving tiny puddles on the floorboards.
|
179020
|
The pizza was perfect, ingredients genuine, not artificial: crust charred slightly; cheese gooey; sauce steaming, requiring careful eating lest the mouth suffer burns. Such quality was becoming rare around town. The product in Manhattan, by and large,
|
1790104
|
What happens to a town when all of its songbirds go on strike?
|
179022
|
Most people assume I’m gay, and have assumed I’m gay since I was in fifth grade. Maybe sooner. Maybe fifth grade is just my first memory of recognizing what other people believed true about me. But coming out as a gay man in 1987, when I was in fifth gra
|
17902413
|
You hear the thrum of blowflies first...
|
179094
|
History is replete with brutally imaginative techniques of torture and execution, but I am the only death machine that doubles as a musical instrument.
|
1790127
|
I have no more use for the beautiful words you used to like so much for me tosend you alone. See my feathers donot so much hide me now as giveme away; I tend to feel farfrom home. Forgive me this. Theend jumped by me quicker than anorange flower cricket on its…
|
