Then I heard it -- a sound like an oboe being strangled. Teeny was farting onto the cement stoop through her jeans, a tripple flutter blast.

So I'm digging, clawing the black earth, disappearing in its ore and shadow.

We married in the ruins of a pachinko hall, the tiny bones in the pocket of your tracksuit luring a pack of wild dogs out from the underpass.

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…

Winter melts to ashes and now we walk where hillocks dip like pillows, where a warm pocket of air keeps the scent of spring beauties for itself. Sensitive vetch so easily shocked folds under a feather yet the earth trembles where trout lilies shove. Buds stall on lilacs…

...I stared at my good dog with the same entreaty I saw in her eyes. Save us. Please.

Why do men become explorers? he asked. Because they want to cannibalize the unknown; to leave the chemicals, the furniture (and, yes, the shrew) behind; to make their way hi ho into the brush, whose weeds and lianas remain empty of the exhortations of Jesus Christ, whose…

It don't knock you down to the goddamned ground and push your face into the mat and dare you to get back up. Just so it can knock you down again. They don't have real dreams. Dreams that make them wake up in the middle of the night. Hurting. Wanting.

Homer relaxes in his tan, faded recliner, remote in hand, and watches death unfold on his television.

Jasmine invited herself over and plopped herself on my futon. "Let's fuck," she said, bluntly. "I want to."

"He doesn't have a parish," I said. "He works in a hospital in the East Bay. He told me that if I were in that hospital and I woke up and saw him, I was in big trouble."

“You always use that as a crutch. You, a sixteen year old girl. The way you were…” She looked at me, shaking her head, looking at my body as if remembering some wrong, some thing that should not have been.

She bought her first gerbil at the age of nine. She wondered if he would die from endless logrolling. When he died from natural causes, she refused to bury him and kept a distance from the first boy who kissed her--Thomas J. Hobbit. The next year a twister swept…

She feels the music deep in her belly,her hips swaying, she looks out through lids no longer guardedand sees you, Her knees bend, her eyes close, She is moving back and forth,a pulse in time,Her arms snake around her head,She does not ask,may I enjoy myself?…

She takes her hamburgers medium rare and the pickles remind her of the taste of last night's penis before she stuffed the stranger's apologies in a jar.