captured by his lens and plates/ before humidity and hydrocarbons/ smudge the crisp clean lines

His eyes drift over the body of every woman who enters Starbucks, even though he’s old enough to be their father or grandfather, still his eyes are aware of every shape passing by, refusing to let go, and die. Maybe they’re speaking Polish or

The question posed a voluptuous riddle. Were these frenzied silhouettes gestures of Jackson Pollock’s dribble?

At the time I first went to work for Mr. Byron my family was in a sorrowful state. My dad, much as I can recall, was one of those roving kinds, called himself a carpenter or contractor, depending on the kind of job he was aspiring to, and was subject to f

For the next two hours, Ed goes nonchalantly about his business, buck naked the whole time. He putters around the house, writes e mails, waters plants, vacuums the rug and sweeps the porch. I pretend to ignore his nudity

My cousin had put them up last year, showed me when we stood on her bed as her fingers pointed, traced over the outlines, then turned out the lights, so that I could see them glow.

One year, she got a kite.

It’s confusing enough to grow up in a place like America, a country without definitive culture, except for ranch dressing and reality TV, but it’s even worse to grow up half one thing, half another, christened a hyphenation of names without connection to

There were literally thousands of criteria that got people of every stripe and strata on the list, which had been maintained since before the very first human fingers scrawled crude images on blank surfaces. 

This no man's island I'm perched high above isn't always so beautiful to the casual beholder of newly printed maps. Oh don't go and get your clouds all wrong. Puffed or thin, everything I say I believe in is a real feeling, until the music dies…

My parents were married for forty five years. “A lifetime,” is how the rabbi at my mother's funeral describes it. The man says it with such a tone of familiarity, of genuine sadness, that one might think he has known and adored my parents all their lives. But…

Martin named it “Squishy” for two reasons. The first reason was because it was the noise it made when it came out of the hole in his basement. The second is because it’s what it did to Grandfather...

The things we do for books, she thought.

“It’s a sad thing,” I said, “when a man has to suffer just for getting a little on the side.”

Wee-wee-sweet-pea me? I live, I weep, a third of me passed in sleep, start a scene or two, play and dance the fool, …