When the malady struck and the world fell dark at noon, she and I groped the walls and found our front door. Outside, bewildered, we heard the whine of jets in free-fall, explosions in the imagined distance. And we heard a car — or was it a truck that veered…

Coward, cuckold, she taunts: So be it. He's not a young man anymore, nor as clever as he once was, or thought.

A wrinkled man lie atop an ivory-clad mattress, matched sheets covered his body, matched hair covered his head.

the first day of preschool/ my mother walked me down the street/ to a tall building that cut/ like a knife made of bricks/ right into the street,/ an american flag/ sticking straight out/ just above the door.

The robot may be grabbing onto something so big I'm mistaking it for the countryside, or the sunset. I could just be one cog in an infinite chain of leg-attachment, stretching from the cosmos to the sub-atomic.

I remember thinking the seasons are arriving later every year, as if the world has been slowed by the weight of graves.

I read my book of names. Over and over again. Our name appeared in the newspaper 254,991 times between 1896 and 1944.

Requires one of those leaps.

After Jonesy entered the bear habitat, he walked up to the biggest bear in the group and punched it square in the nose. The bear was visibly startled. I mean, bears don’t get punched that often. And there’s a reason: bears are ferocious animals.

Some nights you really feel it.

Not long ago, Owen the Second showed her a skull. He kept it in a brown cardboard box in the top of the closet. "My first wife," he said, and sneered, his lip bunching up around a scar just under his nose.

A cult is one thing; it defies common sense that a commonly educated person cannot escape cultist thinking and belonging. That cult, A.A., is girded by police, fire, therapy, hospitals, insurance companies, and courts.

published in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review.

The ghosts run before/ attacking horsemen. A heart/ is ruptured by a spear.

I took Annie to the zoo, and the tigers got out. The little tigers, that is. Cubs. Two of them. The zoo employees scurried about, peeking into nooks and crannies.