"Being honest with me," said her teacher, "will hopefully allow you to be honest with yourself--writing is about being honest, and articulating that honesty." It sounded like a riddle, and her teacher looked at her with the sanctimony of a wizard.

a Ferris wheel gently rocks its last riders then dumps them to the ground.

Fingers fan like birds’ wings cradling the volume, head hanging low and lips moving silently...

Warren Jeffries had called me on the phone the night before and said, “Listen to this,” as he held the receiver out his bedroom window at the noise coming from the riot on campus. They were spraying gas over People’s Park, trying to get them to disp

And as you try to read, he appears. No, not in front of you, but somewhere just behind your eyes. You hear the sound at the end of an argument, just before the kiss; you see a shirt fall to the ground in late summer; you watch him read as his mouth

I wake up with the taste of mud in my mouth. Ashy, sulfurous, charred, with traces of rotten shellfish.

Waking in the middle of the night, tangled in the hotel sheets, I wanted to hear the story again: their pilot friend, the war, his specialty. "It's just a screw, son," Dad said, "nothing exotic."

Mounds of earth and grassless ground

Pre-mortem

“Americans like beer, right?” he asks. “It’s not acceptable for a woman to buy beer.” He proffers it in a brown paper bag.

I opened my switchblade mouth and sliced through the scab of silence.

A little poem

In the small hours, when the crackling of the embers had stopped and the room had gone cold, the boiler kicked in and the pipes began to clang. He was half-roused out of his sleep, and then slipped under again to dream of Marley's fettered ghost.

we're only playing with this language you and I

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