1371 9 6
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he’s recognizable in the earliest images of misery: a hand shoving a young gladiator before the lion; the fire devouring a witch in Salem. And here he is. Again.
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137065
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He was a beautiful older man, late sixties, who reminded me of a movie star with a thick mane of silver hair parted neatly from left to right and eyes the color of that stretch of Pacific Ocean between San Pedro and Catalina Island, the calming blue of a carefree weekend…
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137052
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She sees the little girls in the yard through her front window. They’re as naked as the day they were born, not far from the event itself. They dip backward and forward like pitchers, laughing, balling up their little white fists and shaking them like t
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137052
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“It’s about basic working conditions!” she says, rubbing ice cubes on her nipples.
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1370176
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Yankees call them daffodils.
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13701211
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Cellulite is legal to have, either way.
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1370204
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In the hotel lobby, the gold light and warmth and flower arrangements were all lies, but they reminded us of spring. We imagined happiness. We checked in.
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1370159
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At the graveyard, the leaves had been raked into loose array....
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137021
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The trail wound through oak trees and climbed up a hill. The sun was high and hot whenever we came out from the cover of the trees.
We stopped under a tree.
“OK old man,” Leda said. She came to me and kissed me. Then she was unbuttoning my pants and kne
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137011
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Before the bills, before the fighting, before the need to blame something, there was a moment blown empty in the span of one doctor’s breath, a moment where bar nights and weekend benders had no meaning, a moment where the future was as blank as the bac
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137032
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'Yer a cool, cool glass of water baby....'
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137064
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You're thinking I don't have a conscience, right? I'm asking you.
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137020
|
A bank bag now hung from those teeth—yellow-gray rancid, decaying teeth, strands of tobacco chew laced in between. Those thin pen mark lips could not hide the teeth’s keyhole spaces, shaped by open cavities—the bank bag hung from those teeth. The me
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13702212
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It starts on the Fallopian Speedway
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13701514
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I wrote this during a poetry workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with Carolyn Forché. January, 2015. So much more has happened since that stunning week.
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137063
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I can tell you all about rock bottom.
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136997
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master carvers do not reduce with carving.
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136900
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The water was like glass except for a ripple here and there where Spearing were jumping. Joe didn’t know whether they were playing or avoiding being lunch for larger fish. He set up shop above the point where, light years ago, his father, a fisherman, had
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1369188
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I told him he was just paying for his sins. He gave me a look. "Why me?" he asked.
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136931
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Polo could sense the tension with his group. He was unsure what the creatures would do to them.
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13691512
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She wears three or four tattered sweaters on cool days. She pushes a basket borrowed from a grocery store. There is a plastic lawn bag in the basket with God knows what inside.
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1369124
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I look for the boy we met inside the club, the one who claimed he loved playing with matches, setting fire to churches. I spot him smoking a cigarette, standing so cool against the side of the club, like he might be the nephew of some Viking guitarist hun
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13691211
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What would you do today if you knew your time was up
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136900
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"Something happened to me, Rasul, and I got these powers for a reason ... then I just happened to have a karaoke buddy who happens to have grown up in a family of magicians, who knew something about what I was going through? That's *fate*!"
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1369156
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1368124
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"Cooperation and sharing could eliminate poverty."
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1368105
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there she was, this beautiful duck with her 4 beautiful babies, under my bush.
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1368116
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The voices he hears are God and the Devil and he knows the difference. Therefore, he is not mentally ill.
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136801
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Word traveled fast at school on Monday. Emma Jakowski had actually captured him. He was being held in her dad's tool shed. Anyone who wanted to see him had to be in the Jakowski's backyard by 3:15 that afternoon, chocolate bunny ears in hand. It was no…
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1368108
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A dark girl, quite poor, maybe three, maybe four, leaned on a statue of a horse and his man. (The rider rode him in place, but as if in a race.) Her dress needed patching, her heart needed smoothing. She'd tried to sell…
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