“I scheduled some time today to talk to you about something…something important. Since you’re going on with your life, leaving everything you’ve known so far, you’re going to need some information about sex.”

It might not seem easy to breathe any love into a name like Father. It’s a stiff word—it’s not soft, like, say, Papa—but sometimes you have to breathe love into names you don’t choose.

Mounds of earth and grassless ground

There was an ownership about the makeshift carnival. There was a therapy there.

We want our lives even-cut, …

When we were on the road coming back out to California, along the Lewis and Clark trail somewhere near Cardwell, Montana, I remember thinking life was like leaping through flames while reading poetry and drinking rotgut red wine. This was what life was, a

I loved to visit my grandparents when I was a kid.

I can confirm nothing/ but impressions of the world// that appear beyond my/ body’s reach.

That night he dreamed about a duel with toothbrushes....

So I’ll wait for her to clear all burden from her head and feel the ocean move us. Stand up, walk over to me and kiss me as we glided through open water.

Yellow Pages season is on us now, and Jimmy's drivin' a contract route. He'll head out to the San Joaquin where they print, and load ‘em in the back of his Tundra with the high side walls until the whole damned rig sags low,

His work was done. For sixty years, beginning soon after his seventeenth birthday, he had listened to the gods- good, bad, somewhere in between-

Pre-mortem

["This is not a snippet of text. This is only a test."]