Digging in another garden, jumping into another space and time, I impaled a toad on the tines of a garden fork. At first I thought the toad was a clump of clay, stuck to the thick tine, but before I could kick the clay off with my…

we swim in failure

When I no longer know you, what signal will you give to remind me that you and I once loved?

Marge bought the rug on-line.

"Are you all right?" I ask. He blinks. He sits up. I help him stand. He looks sorrowfully at his coffee cup, which is on the floor.

don't look at me honey, I fell on the table, my hair is on fire, my heart is unstable

My cats are my world and more. They are rotund, little indoor-girl cats, though, who were taken from their mother too early to learn things like hunting and properly washing their privates, and so they think the mouse is just another interesting thing to

“He put his stuff down—sunglasses, lotion and so forth—and I noticed there’s a little notebook that he didn’t have before.‘What’s that?’” I asked, and he said ‘Nothing.’”

As I go by I see five, six high school kids standing on the corner waiting for the bus. They are huddled together like a bunch of ducks....

I could trust that most nights I would drop off to sleep at around midnight and shortly thereafter dream an “us dream”, a how we were dream, a sensing of our bodies undulating, then moving faster, moving with the waves of a special music only we could hear, with…

The right is empty, waiting to receive the load like a catcher behind home plate.

She'd always been an odd girl, nearly raising herself. As she got breasts and hips the boys complained that she was easy to get in the backseat, but afterward the car wouldn't run, not ever, like the engine died the moment they used her willingness up. So

My poems have appeared in four different publications; three have died shortly after they ran my stuff. Coincidence, or something more sinister?

Fortunately, when the bird hits the sliding glass doors in our den, I know what to do.

When she was nineteen, she began to brew a baby in her belly. She named it, and sang to it, and organized the leftover hand-me-downs that hadn't been worn ragged through by the first seven sets of recipients.