1323 19 13
|
but I pretend again I've kept the prairie/
out, have battled back the smoke and dirt
|
132331
|
Picking up a perfect stranger—perfect meaning dead, in this case—and shaping him into the man you’d want him to be is not so easy.
|
1323123
|
|
132340
|
I hadn't yet assembled enough pieces of Italian to explain any of this, but it was hardly necessary. The fact that I was a scrittore in a language foreign to her seemed to make me especially fascinating...
|
13222016
|
The custard of eternity is scooped into
the quantum cone of knowledge and drips
out the bottom one lifetime at a time.
|
1322137
|
Here’s how you do it. First you get a ladder, a long one.
|
13221813
|
One must be drenched in words.
|
132242
|
Take shelter from the rain inside the Museum of Sex.
|
132252
|
Scratching must be like what crack is.
|
1322155
|
I made myself tiny as I could, imagining I was Houdini shackled underwater, holding my nose and practicing my escape...
|
132254
|
He said he'd meet me at the Lyric before curtains. For drinks. Only he didn't. Which was OK. The seat was softer, roomier without him. Buzzer rang, doors closed. His loss. Rusalka was clearer. More resonant. Vibrant. Better. …
|
13221210
|
Another siege/
with kamikaze fervor.
|
132242
|
God's honest truth, I wake up every morning when my clock punches out its dulcet, insistent clangs, a setting called Ultra Zen Up & Out. I brush my teeth with a blue dollar store toothbrush and watch one of the five morning TV shows designed to let me know the weather…
|
132254
|
Quail looked up at her. Unsmiling, challenging.
Lemme just go wash my hands, he said.
She closed the door, bolted it. You won’t need your hands.
|
132222
|
So it's me and two other girls...
|
132221
|
It wasn't that I couldn’t imagine it. Rather, I could almost conjure the choreography to mind. One of his hands would graze at the side of my face. One finger would extend and stroke me, from my temples to my chin. He would press my body against something
|
1322104
|
What happens to a town when all of its songbirds go on strike?
|
132222
|
My friend once told me about this island of trash in the Pacific. He said that if you threw a piece of trash in any body of water it would find its way there somehow.
|
1322136
|
The three were up early to await the deer with rifles, ammunition, and coffee.
|
132164
|
There were days in my youth when, through no fault of their own, my parents could not drive me the seven mile trip to my elementary school. When I got older they bought me a bike and that proved duly adequate as conveyance. But when I was six years in age
|
1321107
|
Difference 'twixt night and day
|
132133
|
He was a sushi chef, and he would spend hours in their kitchen practicing his knife skills, and the speed with which he can put that there and this in that and so on; and she would see him on the floor most mornings, still wearing that dirty, tattered ban
|
132156
|
in our teens as tough as the cold/we wore denim and flannel with our boots/kicking at whichever wind blew . . .
|
132175
|
Independence Day was a Thursday. Frank had been invited to join some Yale Art School classmates in Vermont for a three-day bacchanalia.
|
132187
|
next time i come around i want to be a redwood.
|
132154
|
You know how it is, one day a good friend sends you this long note telling you how-the-hell they are or aren't getting along in the frigging world
|
132166
|
"Absolutely. I get better at it all the time." he confidently replies. He reminds me that it was all her idea. They were online friends when she suggested it. "She loves it." he tells me again, but I think of her sad eyes as she walked upstairs to tend to
|
132120
|
|
1321116
|
She stood with her sisters, pretty maids in a row, felt cold despite the scorching spring sun. Heard what the man said but didn’t register; words from the Lord flew around her like the flighty trill of the robins up above. The birds made more sense.
|
132133
|
A small bar of glycerin soap floated in the sink full of bloody water . . .
|
