Raymond Carver used to write poetry in his car. / Tonight, I tried it too. / I have a car like Raymond Carver / but cannot write poetry like Raymond Carver. / The car isn’t enough.

Shannon refused to jump from the castle drawbridge to the gigantic truck tire sunk halfway down in the playground quicksand. He just stood there-arms folded across his chest, bony knees sticking out from beneath ratty cutoffs-in silence, looking to Rollie

And so the man-faced boy grew alone, knowing little of kindness and love. As he grew, he explored the limits of his cold world; crawling in dusty nappies, toddling in hand-me-down rags, at last walking on worn sandals, haunting the edges of human life loo

i miss you/ at times unbearably/ a dull ache that won’t quit

She suggested just moving in together. A lot less constrained by convention she, on occasion, did not wear a bra.

She had a strange name which I am ashamed/ To have forgotten, seven times, maybe nine,/ Her lips transgressors, wet with sourapple ...

And so we conquered.

I am sitting on our porch in the middle of the night. I can't sleep. The stars look like runway lights. Out of boredom, I reach out my hand to connect the distant dots. The tip of my finger hits…

If he doesn't bite, I'm out of here.

The plan was this: We would take our first vacation. My husband and I would take our 2 ½-year-old son Ethan and 13-month-old son Jonas to Mystic, Connecticut, a 90 minute drive from our home outside of Boston. We would stay at the Hilton, which was right near the Aquarium,…

When VCRs were invented in the 1970s, the first big user segment was people who wanted to watch porno films in the comfort of their own home. Troy and Lynn's upstairs neighbor, James, an enlisted man in the Navy stationed at Pearl Harbor, had a vast porn…

It is late at night and you lean / over me to make sure your alarm is set.

wrenched its lower back trying so hard to lift too many stacked November clouds off the newly shaved prickly heads of the slowly freezing trees,like ring weights,and had to spend the last of its hours setting in a small square box in…

The orchid trembled on its long stem

Emma and I were in a shabby part of town with vacant lots and overgrown yards, and I wondered if something would happen as we loped beside Tom, who was slow-witted and 21. We were 13 . . .