We begged him to sell us some shade. Just enough for half an hour, until our bus would pick us up and drive us to our next destination, continuing what was turning out to be a purgatory tour of forgotten Mediterranean towns.

The skin will stay but you won’t see it,/ camouflaged by creases, tags, and curious/ deposits of renegade fat and pigment.

Prabo was late. It wasn’t like him, I thought, sitting on the steps of the Galle Face Hotel, the Indian Ocean pounding the beach abutting the nearby Galle Face Green and spraying fine mist everywhere. Or at least it didn’t seem like him.

I know you, ladies and gentlemen We see the near future through you Your factual face as you sit indoors Youthless In your ordinary chair

if it were a child/ it would be in first grade this year

44 miles out the gauntlet of Red River pines cast shadows pointing north.

I am getting twisted like a cruller into the mess I have made of this morning and I am stretching the meaning of morning to way past its boundaries.

Let us be stranded in the Andes and have to eat human flesh or at least toothpaste to survive! Let there be an earthquake! Let there be a flood! Let there be a tornado, a new ice age, an invasion from Mars. Only: let me survive.

The unpublished writer remembered the carnage that surrounded his Foxhole in France and decided he was done praying. All around lay the evidence that no one was listening. The drunken pastor stumbled away.

She pulled into the doorway. Uncertain where to spend the night. Certain there'd once been a place with food. Here. This place. She remembered. Curtains. Small tables. Coffee cups thick-handled and sturdy. Crockery. Some words came back.

Albert Einstein was probably the genius of our age. Joe Biden is a close second, yet Einstein not only had better hair but a keener knack to think of things that no one else could, or would, or would ever want to, since if they did, their brain would shockingly combust in a…

In her blanched beauty, seated in a silver deck chair, with complacent socialist ways

I am heading to work. It's early and Clare is still asleep. When I hit the breezeway I realize that I forgot my keys. I walk back into the house and start rustling through the junk on the table by the door. After a moment I sense someone standing behind me and…

Marv felt a stirring. Warmth in his gut. "Maybe we should get together," Marv said.

of placing the rope just so; of settling the veil with care --