1962 33 15
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To envy faith, to envy love --//
is there a fate more hateful? Choices/
scatter like stars. Too many.
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1962129
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Harpo sits and looks at something I can't see. I drink beer and ask him questions. I ask him how they found the cancer. Backache, he says. He went to see a doctor.
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1961107
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Things get lost in Big John, too. I see the other guys throw jokes about his size at his body that wedge their way into his armpits or into the wrinkles of his laugh lines and disappear. I’m not sure if it all disappears to remind us how small we are,
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196166
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When I wake up and look to my left, will you be there with me, snoring like an asthmatic bear?
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196110
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Almost on cue, Xavier emerges and is in the vendor’s face. “X,” as he is known around here, is indoctrinating the obvious newbie on the merits of showing up earlier and the logistics of placeholders and markers.
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196144
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I’ve had it to here you see.
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196120
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She’s right there in Thirsty’s. In her usual spot. Drinking her usual drink. Yuengling on tap. One after another.
And he’s there too. Behind the bar. Pouring drinks. One after another.
Sometimes they speak. But mostly she orders. He pours. And
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196185
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We were old. Wind came in with small threats and played games with drapes. A print of orchids and some other green affair that looked to me like kiwis. Sadie was arranging some items on a desk and I noticed there was a cricket on the window. I was thinking…
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196110
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Elin and I had religious differences about the garage. To her the garage required regular sweeping and organization--it was an extension of our house. Elin believed dust and mold to be manifestations of inner sin. I insisted that they were agents of evolu
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196122
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She hated the noiseless dying sound they made as he stuck the hook through their eyes. She always wanted for them to scream, but they never did. They didn’t even blink.
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196061
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Bearing the smell of paper on her fingertips. Ink in her hair.
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196010
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The rustling of the dry leaves when he moved even slightly sounded like thunder to him, and he was sure if any of the other kids from the neighborhood got too close, it was the noise that would end up giving him away.
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196041
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She comes in with her white bag with its floral patterns scattered, almost accidentally, all around it
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1960135
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She slipped into a silky sheath dress, and stepped into black sequined heels just as the doorbell rang. Her date had arrived to take her to his much touted Art opening in town. Reaching under the bathroom sink for a final mist of hair spray she realized too late…
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1960106
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—Pretty tulips, said the woman.
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19601010
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A block after his first crime, he found a bookstore to commit another.
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196062
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The figure was covered in a light blue chenille bathrobe, splayed out on her back on the floor by the glass door, her hair done up in large curlers, a slipper lying askew by her left foot. Richie crouched near the face and the rancid flame of bourbon lea
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196032
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‘Hmph! Dream indeed! “Past the wit of man to say what dream it was” - the man's a knotty-pated arse.' The old master-weaver spat into the fire, his rheumy eyes bright with contempt, then looked round furtively; Nathaniel was not yet returned,…
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1960104
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They live a simple life..two solitudes by lamplight.
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196042
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To write a good poem, one needs nothing but the whole intent of goodness.
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195911
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The red laser flashes. He asks if I have an Ace Rewards card. I can't even answer because my beans have stopped jumping. I wonder if the laser light harmed them. Then one jumps and another, and I hand the boy some money, suddenly very fond of my beans.
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1959155
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Megalomania is a kind of backwards leprosy. It rots your insides out while your skin glistens and grows tighter around your bones.
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195900
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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
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195911
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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.
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195930
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...it was just my heart stnging through my eyes...
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19593018
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I dreamed that coffee grounds had spilled on my Buffet. There was another clarinet, a silver one, that belonged to a man not in the room, that was clean of debris.
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195855
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He has one good eye and is missing the other. The socket of his missing eye squints with a disturbing and unfathomable insight.
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195822
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Marion had decided to stop whenever she came upon Amarillo. It was close to two a.m. when she pulled into the motel parking lot. Momma, read the nametag on the woman at reception. Her face was illuminated by a TV. Her hair curlers were illuminated by the lone desk lamp…
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195822
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I know it’s nobody’s fault, and that one thing had nothing to do with the other, because it was this way for me since I was born; they just didn’t figure it out for a while that with one of my ears I could hardly hear, and with the other, I couldn
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1957105
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Are we like a poem, a short hand of words curtained together, evoking a mood, but in the end, impenetrable? We follow the clues to our lover's heart and what we find isn't him at all but ourselves. We fill every part of his life, every part of his past and even become…
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