“Pupilo Durcál!” She yelled. “You stupid pendejo!” He limped along without another glance. Rosa suddenly realized her dreams all week were really omens.

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.

When I was six, my father brought home a fishbowl. Look out for the inhabitants, he said. You can play Neptune in their microcosm of the sea.

Know what you’ll become? You’ll become one of those guys who masturbates in any single occupancy restroom that locks.

You’re mad as a hatter she said. Eons, eras of epochal proportions go by before you call me. I said recalibrate your linear thinking, incubator baby. I whispered permutations of wonder, told her secrets only the sufis know. We ate French goat cheese lac

All right, so the frog I risked my lips on (not to mention the contents of my stomach) . . . .

I knew I needed to visit a beach / made entirely of sharks’ teeth

The image was startlingly unfamiliar. Looking at it, no one would guess it had been their last attempt, their last failure. No one would believe that they had never really been that way, or that the life they shared was built on mind games, manipulation a

I carefully placed the knife back to its original position and, with poorly contained excitement, retrieved a palm from the fridge. It was slightly wrinkled, but it was just as fair as the rest of the pristine white in the fridge. It felt warm to my hands

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.

You died from a bad heart.

maybe if I bat my lashes just right, or look prim enough to fly, you just might touch me tonight, and the dream will pop and fizz and I will wake somewhere, your hands smoothing these lines of worry away.

—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.

Write a poem in which your father is a dog and you are his leash.

Alone,we are ageless togetherin the heart of our precious now.A relentless wedge of image and vanity, gossip and innuendo, acceptable and most certainly not, dashes our agelessness intoan insurmountable chasm of years.That diabolically…