New York, New York The winter drizzle left the streets shiny like in movies and this night Manhattan looked like it should look, vibrant, clean and sparkling. It was…

“How scared?” Mikey said, not wanting to find out, and already looking pretty nervous.

Both his parents saved their pent up Puritan pasts to fill his ears with brimstone clichés. "Idle time is the devil's playground", he would tell me, scrunching up his face, stuffing it full of meat lovers pizza.

I knew my cat was capable of telepathy when I began to have isolated, random, non-cause-related thoughts about food and feelings, little signals, and I realized that the signs — images of tangerines, tuna, bones; the idea of choice; slate, names; the feeling of…

I knew nothing about the letter at first. When I came in that morning and smiled and said good morning, it was a genuine smile and a heartfelt good morning. But the letter, which had arrived the previous afternoon, was already doing its corrosive work of

A group of nuns arrived in the middle of my first night at Hinsdale Hospital. I guess I must have dozed off when this odd noise, like curtains being moved, woke me up. At first I couldn't make out what that rustling sound was in the hallway outside my doo

I imagined the crystals in my mouth. Salt flowers blooming on my tongue.

Marge didn't eat lamb or pork.

The pear is a bruise. Feels like desperation in the light, it looks soft and blue. She wants to touch it and doesn’t want to. How the blood gathers under the blue and the body grows tender. Swells. Slowly.

Twice burned, it buries its graves.

She seems to be demanding someone donate to her a beard. No one has gone any further with this, and the electricity of her song about beards, listing, growing more undulant, crescendos.

Harold’s a thinker, authors their plans. Last week he swiped six encrusted cans of Stroh’s from a faded cooler in his dad’s garage. He and LS guzzled each one in a chigger-weed patch behind the school gym, slurping and thumbing a stack of purloined

The fish would need a name, but she didn’t know how to tell if it was a boy or a girl. Did fish have penises?

Back in the sixties, I chanced upon a list of books. That’s right. Sifting a black garbage bin, I found the long lost canon. Seizing the moment, I snatched the list, and cradled it in my palms. I felt proud and patriotic for saving such a noble list f

words have their own ancestors,/deeds are commanded by their own lords./ knowledge and thought do not make me understand—/no surprise, then, that I am not understood.