you drove by the woman standing on the verge the woman with the shoulders of a long distance swimmer and you told yourself her story: she'd slept in the wiregrass she carries…

To tell the truth, I can’t complain. Look, lots of people have it tough. I don’t have it tough...

After lunch it's vocal coaching: shrieking, screaming, crying Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!-Oh-my-God!, panting and face fanning. Next it's ‘situational training', where we pretend to be audience members on real talk shows and practice everything we've learned th

Lou Reed was sitting in CBGB, I was sitting on Greenwich Ave. and West 10th street. I didn't know him then and I didn't know him later either, but we were both there.

My tongue kept me from fitting in with the latinos. I understood little Spanish and spoke even less. No one really believed I was Mexican, and they kept me at a distance. Or maybe I kept them at a distance. Living with

The slicing is easy. Blade barely touching skin, flesh separating into two clean parts. A breath, and blood fills in the space, an old friend materializing in the shadows. I am redolent with hope and desire. I can't stop thinking of how he excised himself from my…

for my father I want to memorize this our time together — what we did without her there to tell me You wouldn't want this life you're not cut out for it — and me the child…

Burne-Jones hair and big-boned body ever-suggestive of a Titian Venus ... [meets] ... warm like toast, grey smiling eyes and dartingly light-footed,

Perseid meteors fly past their ship like cosmic fire-wasps.

Harris Tobiasharristob@gmail.comThe Alarm A terrible clanging in the middle of the night roused me from my bed. I put on some clothes and hurried into the street there to mingle with my bleary eyed neighbors. At first we thought it was a fire but there was…

Wednesdays were humiliating. Third graders had to bring in twenty-five cents for class dues. If you forgot, the teacher would write your name on the board and it would stay there until you settled your debt. My family could afford the weekly quarter; the problem was…

The bartender keeps asking what you smell and you say: lemons, oak, and pear. I smell lust. We move to the reds. Pinot Noir. Cabernet Sauvignon. Port.

To be a backup dancer for Billy Ocean; that's all. I had chubby legs like a baby. They turned out akwardly as if I had broken hips but mum said it was just the way I came out and I would grow out of it.

He wiped it with a damp cloth. He set it in a glazed clay pot next to the sofa and admired its scrawny handsomeness.

I heard on WUSF,