1695 2 1
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Two days before Christmas 1946, my mother put me on an Illinois Central railroad train at the whistle stop of Neoga, Illinois.
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169575
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When you encounter a body laying on the road, drive over it.
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1695149
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I crave the confines of the convent
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16951511
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In the Ardennes for the the first time...
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169598
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169596
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he knows that his wife knows. she can smell the adverbs on his tongue in the mornings. but he cannot get through another evening in that house without consonants.
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169500
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He must have been pleased with his composition, as he repeated and repeated and repeated it. Paul joined in the song. Then the children at neighboring tables joined too, until the song rose into a dining hall chorus.
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169488
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“Too dumb to live,” my wife said when cretins on a motorbike blasted around us nearly taking a side mirror with them.
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169432
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One night he woke up with Underdog laying next to him, breathing softly. He marveled at how fiction could make reality so much better.
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169482
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Once, when he had been married for a year, she sent him a card which said, "If you have seen a cat smoke a pipe, you have got it made." There was an illustration of a big, black panther, standing up on its hind legs, smoking what looked like a big tub of
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169423
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① / empty space / not black / not white / not noise / blanck
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169486
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the swan drives a car ( window down; wing half hanging out ) …
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169463
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If he had not just decapitated a chicken, he was a man I could have loved.
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169466
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He pours another shot and says: Then I buried it in the yard. The time capsule I mean. You have to plug it in to see. I wonder if they’ll know.
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169400
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At street level there is a small arrow on which is printed “Museum of Numbers” that points up a long narrow staircase. There is a restaurant on the first floor. All the way up the stairs, the air is permeated with smell of fried foods
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169410
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[CAUTION: TO PREVENT ELECTRIC SHOCK, DO NOT REMOVE COVER. NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE. REFER SERVICE TO QUALIFIED SERVICE PERSONNEL.]
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169310
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It’s the small stuff. Always. A conversation with a stranger, brief yet so connected it overwhelms you. These encounters can move me beyond my reality, little reminders that, if you just crack the window a little, something very special can blow in.
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169321
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Sweet Tooth needed a little snack, so he ambled on down the hall to the kitchen. He figured to make one of his patented peanut butter, potato chip, tangerine, raisin, and banana sandwiches because those things just always hit the spot. Unfortunately, when he tugged the…
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169311
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A rose and two dollars. Where did they come from? I didn't know anyone who had visited my parents' grave recently, yet that evening I saw a white rose on my mother's side and two bucks on my father's. I took the money and placed my own flowers with the rose. It had to have…
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169340
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I’m not the creative type like my friend Bosely, an Irish Setter. I’m a traditionalist. I like to eat exactly at 8:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. I take my bone with me everywhere I go. I will not carry the poop-bag.
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169356
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in our teens as tough as the cold/we wore denim and flannel with our boots/kicking at whichever wind blew . . .
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169300
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Her hair’s the color of LA at night
On such occasions when the Santa Anas
Have left the hills bone-dry and burning bright
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169395
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I brimmed with sexual energy and it flowed about me like a buttermilk, silk robe. Rich and thick, musk-laden and fortified with my own particular brand of woman.
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169300
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What's the protocol for telling people your spouse has cancer? How do you tell your son, your friends, your co-workers? How do you tell your mother? How do you tell her mother?
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169375
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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.
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1693153
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169300
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woke up to the sound of a diesel
looked out the window to see i’m not home
outta bed to see if you had called
not a damn thing on my phone
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169364
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It was a lover’s dark. They had been talking for hours when daylight lost interest and had gone elsewhere for sport.
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1692199
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I know this: the sky is vast here//
and the sun unforgiving/
to any architecture not the best
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169245
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The summer when I was six and my sister Audrey was eight, she'd walk around our house pretending to be in a trance, fingers strategically hovering over my mother's vases and lamps, leaving smudges behind on my father's heavy oak desk and rocking chair. She'd lumber past my…
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