Their love was doomed at the onset, yet they engaged in it anyway, heedless of the numerous error messages and critical runtime failures. Abort, Retry, Fail? They selected Retry over and over.

I had some words, but the truth is they don't mean a thing because whatever it is I was trying to say to you always crumbles to the ground in front of you. I had some words, but the bullying wind was stronger than me and ripped them…

I am in the hallway, but I don’t sense it. That is to say: I don’t feel my body. I am like a phantom, a limbless entity floating, flailing.

When we were seventeen, after her dad, the preacher, finished his Sunday night church services that required our mandatory attendance, we'd walk to my car in the pasture-turned parking lot holding hands and stop at the passenger-side car door to kiss deeply, get…

What happened then was not entirely innocent or spontaneous. I had been impressed by a scene in Some Came Running by James Jones, where the teenage writer sneaks his girlfriend home and makes love to her on his childhood's bed.

The snake was fang-less and so had to choke her, making the kill bloodless and drawn out, just the way she liked it.

I can still feel the texture of those humid Delta mornings, hear the rhythm of the voices of black children echoing down the halls. I still remember the sense of purpose that I had each day, knowing that this, here, mattered: a child’s education, their

Reality winks at us then scampers off

Your precious feet were there once, pressed against the familiar floorboards, where your poems suddenly appeared to you, flashing like lightning. I wonder which window they came in? Here's a thought: you were like that window. You caught…

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."

It was the first time I had ever seen a possession.

I was sitting on the steps in the entryway to our apartment building taking off my running shoes when I spotted a paperclip on the floor. I assumed it had fallen from the mail that my wife had just taken from our mailbox. Once my shoes were removed, I went down to pick…

And Mickey said to the reporter, "I wrote a play for Richard. It is the wild play I performed with Richard. I think he will like this shit."

While I was still new at Black & Twigg, shortly before Thanksgiving, Percy brought me a handwritten memo to type, the subject “Turkey Hunt,” addressed to all Black & Twigg employees in the San Francisco office from management. It said that the firm…

You took up residence on the dark side of things, a bolthole in a wind-flayed right angle of a tower block where pigeons and suicides tumbled blackly on the air currents. You set about drifting off from who you were on a tide of cheap whisky and bad poetry, graduating…