Eddie meets Sarah Packard, a “college girl” played by Piper Laurie. She walks with a limp, a fact Eddie doesn’t notice at first because she’s sitting down at a diner table in a bus station. She’s alcoholic and writes poetry.

A week ago, Lina had felt a pain crack over her right eyebrow. It was there every day, creeping from her ear to the middle of her forehead.

The heart attack felt like the time Alison stabbed me with knitting needles. It made me want to see her. She was the fun wife, the first of three. I was morbid and full of regret — my drinking had driven them away, no kids in the wake. I decided to visit all of…

What becomes the identity of a woman who has been denied all her rights and thrown into a mental institution?

The night we broke into Bron-yr-Aur it was too cold to make love. I said I wasn't horny anyway. You put your hand on my forehead: Are you ill?

"For several days thinking they had found a dead man’s boot beside the highway..."

strung from her window to a tree

MOSAIC Your eyes coal-rimmed, busted, burned by betrayal. You and I, knee to knuckle, skinny with disorders and blurred around our edges. Challenged by our experience and the ash of past-love dusting the grate, the state, the…

I got on the Greyhound Bus at 11 a.m. and sat by myself staring out the window. I could see the reflection of my own dark beard in the window, a 27 year-old man with a huge poem bursting my heart, gasping to get out into the bright lit-up world out there,

In human rights, a man and a woman may marry and bring forth a family. It is a civil right in the U.S. but not a human right (as far as I know) to raise a child singly without the knowledge of the other parent.

(the vast preponderance of dark matter and dark energy discernible in these latter days begins to suggest just how dark the humor of existence is) . . .

If the Titanic rises from the bottom of the sea, I will meet you on deck, in a deck chair. Fully dressed for a change.

Mom wraps a bulky-knit scarf around my face and over my mouth. She tightens it into a big knot in back of my collar.

Everyone loves a story of love unrequited. But what about the stories of the unrequited lovee?

For reasons he couldn't fathom, his motorcycle only moved in reverse. He engaged the engine and lurched backward hard. He called a friend, a gear-head with perpetually dirty nails, asked him to look it over.