1613 8 9
|
They coo and gurgle in the warmth of twig and down. They are so delicate, hard to look at without thinking of death. I tell them I want for them chief among all things strength, speed, resilience.
|
161321
|
She pictured the President leaving the hospital a few days later, hobbling on a cane. Jackie beside him, Caroline and John-John dashing from a waiting limousine. He couldn’t die. She’d looked into his eyes. John F. Kennedy spoke to her.
|
161210
|
His lawyer, with looming, supermodel good looks, had a mild case of Tourette's. She would be talking to you and then there would be a little tic and her head would bob slightly to the left, and her eyes would go a little blank, and then this very strange
|
161210
|
The way I felt was as though you were, every day, making the conscious and deliberate decision not to be with me, not to share your life with me—and not to share my life, that you were choosing not someone else, but something else.
|
161273
|
-for Franz, the least understood comedian of all We all knew that Marissa's college boyfriend was ugly — there was the way she answered our mother's pestering "Is he cute?" with a stalling "Um, well..." and then there was the fact that she hadn't posted any photos…
|
161212
|
“Choices overwhelmed us,” Thomas continued, years later, “like waves crashing.”
|
161210
|
He huddles against the wooden beam of a chop suey stand, glaring out into the giant technological organism that was his city. Lights, hulking monstrosities and endless possibilities were teeming in the night-hustle that surrounded him.
|
16121410
|
The smart drivers know the signs/
and the back street ways around the wreck.
|
161275
|
...a headwater stream that has never had a name....
|
161221
|
I am far from home, wherever that is.
|
161243
|
"this is the year I'm going to plant a yucca tree in the garden."
|
16121412
|
She was sick and tired of marriage. She didn't want to be a mother, but now she was.
|
161221
|
|
161200
|
If they don’t cover consequences in your gifted and talented program, you may care to research it.
|
16121912
|
I was to limp with stunned, growing horror, as I navigated through the swirling smoke and maze of human corpses...
|
161198
|
... black holes suck in matter and supernovas explode.
|
161110
|
“Well” I say. “What do you think about the dilemma of a guy who’s tortured by a history of incest and bondage?”
“Depends” Says Al. “On who was cested and who was bonded.
|
161120
|
the smell of the small cedar chips burning in the fireplace
|
161177
|
can they approve, our/gods in our wallets? only/when we tell them to.
|
161111
|
Then a flicker caught my eye. To the left of the balcony, where the residential high-rise abutted a commercial building to its right, a shape--half-dark, half-lit--stood on a limestone ledge.
|
161122
|
Over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house they went, Will and his new girlfriend Emma from Atlanta for the annual family dinner and drunken disaster in Allendale.
|
1611129
|
|
161177
|
fuck you Charles Bukowski
go cry in your eggs in a Jersey diner
|
161100
|
Late spring, summer before cancer. Frank drove Max and his pal Jason to Cincinnati for their first rock show. Less Than Jake at Bogart's. A two-hour drive for ska-punk.
|
1611149
|
Shred the roses he posted, fling the petals like slideshows of storms.
|
161121
|
Blood had soaked through his Converse All-Stars, and into his cotton sox. It was the smell of metal, of iron more specifically, that nudged his mind out from the fog of shock and denial, closer to the reality of his circumstances.
|
161185
|
“Perhaps instead of a book I could write lists of words, in alphabetical order, an avalanche of isolated words which expresses the truth I still do not know” — Italo Calvino albumen before child grit secretlyshame august blood …
|
1611104
|
Lapping salt beads from/
my crackling, ecstatic lips.
|
161033
|
Satan is a wide-eyed Pollyanna mime who communicates with a ventriloquist dummy that corrects my grammar, speaks in internet acronyms, tells me that I’d be a lot prettier if I just smiled more and lost fifteen pounds, and nags me about how all my problems
|
161055
|
You will never know how much it hurts
When someone else touches your face.
But I also know how much you count on others
To pull the slivers out of your heart.
|
