1761 7 4
|
"Merry Christmas, Willie."
|
1761101
|
Loving you, I always knew, was a job I’d only get via a dead woman’s shoes. There you were, the recipient of pot roasts, fresh bread, at a loss amongst neighbourhood widows and divorcees. A tide of them rolled over you in calico blouses, cut off jeans
|
176122
|
Next to you, the mother tightens her grip on her stroller. The young teenager tears her gaze from her mobile phone for an instant.
|
176132
|
Hair today...gone tomorrow
The sun beats down
on my balding crown.
|
1761127
|
my space heater throws a pale orange light
my white candles flicker in the middle of the night
|
176120
|
I remember being sent a picture once from one of my old roommates, Louise, back in Chicago where I came from. The photo was taken when she’d come out for a visit to California. In the picture I am sitting on the front stairs of my house in the Rockridge
|
176111
|
The closed door swallowed up both voices, and all I could make out afterward were muffled pleas and angry answers that died completely.
|
176101
|
I am reaching out at you, to you from the nest. From the nest, please come to the nest, to see me and to hear my life story. From the nest I go, and then I arrive at the nest, suddenly, just in time to be…
|
1761137
|
a Ferris wheel gently rocks
its last riders
then dumps them to the ground.
|
1760124
|
"Cooperation and sharing could eliminate poverty."
|
176011
|
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.
|
176020
|
a store called ROCKING FROCKS. In its window was a black tee shirt that said in big white letters, I'M NOT A SLUT, I'M WITH THE BAND.
|
1760123
|
I'm explicating Emily Dickinson when the alarm starts: three long, two short. Lockdown mode. Only there was nothing in the staff bulletin about a drill. So I tell the students to get down on the floor, away from the window. I open the classroom door and lock it from…
|
1760108
|
Half-pint Ball canning jars, each labeled in earnest capital letters, took up a whole wall of Teeny’s bedroom. Inside each jar was air she had collected from some place important to her life.
|
176022
|
“Let’s see that great big telescope of yours,” she exhaled hotly, “I want to grind your lenses!” The doctoral candidate dutifully stood between her and his massive telescope so her hands would encounter some instrumentation with no optical components.
|
176074
|
The officers carried him away in cuffs as he yelled "I NEED STATS! PLEASE! JUST GIVE ME THE STATS!"
|
176084
|
I awake one morning to find that still,
the leaves continue to fall.
|
1760135
|
The javelin was cancelled after the unfortunate incident with Mrs Parker last year, but no one could have predicted this year’s sack race tragedy.
|
17602913
|
Cinnamon and smoke
infuse the days that shorten,
chill, accelerate.
|
176062
|
If we thought that love was gone
that out of sweetness none remained
|
175976
|
He hasn't had a wedding ring in years. When George's knuckles began to swell — a little arthritis — his ring dug into his finger so bad his wife Loren took him to the ER and had it cut off. The ring, not the finger. He never knew there was a tool to cut rings,…
|
175900
|
Track One Johnny Burkemeister, lead vocals and flutist of the band Albatross Antics, sits on his bed thinking in silence. His elbow rests on his knee, and his palm on his forehead with his fingers running through his dirty-blonde hair. He is staring at a copy of Paste…
|
1759112
|
...and he would stumble from bed in a panic and fling the toothbrush at the mirror cursing all the while "fuck fuck why can't I forget her".
|
175933
|
Things are a little out of hand. Information fills room after room after room. I have no bloody idea where I am. I have your photo, but the navigational coordinates are difficult to interpret. Where the hell are you, anyway? I don't like mazes — too much like…
|
17591712
|
When asked to turn over the Church's riches / he brought before the Roman prefect the poor, blind, ragged and infirm.
|
175933
|
I know I’m slipping
into my mother’s skin. I answer the phone
with her voice; her hands grind the coffee beans.
And who is this listening to NPR in the morning
while the fresh-faced girls in the neighborhood trudge toward school,,
peonies han
|
175977
|
How much do book editors earn? Peacock Love. (aww…)
|
17592313
|
I am abandoned to the mundane/
calculations of a small mind/
trapped by small considerations
|
175977
|
I want to be that daring gardener who ploughs up her front yard -- to the horror of the Neighborhood Association.
|
17591010
|
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…
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