Morning time had come again. Kojo felt the beginning of the day, but couldn't know it yet. Awareness came first: the temperature of the room, the light behind his eyelids, how much of him could feel a draft. Then, before it was taken from him, he recalled the memory of a…

Beneath their feet bedrock stretched a hundred miles

“Would you look at that one!” my father said. “Who did she know?” my mother asked. “Who did she blow?” my father said loudly, and burst out laughing. I laughed too, although I didn't know why. My mother shot him one

She stood there with her back to me and her dress around her ankles.

"One-upmanship" is a strategy for defeating an opponent somewhat unfairly without actually cheating.

I worry for the daffodils/ and there optimistic yellow bursts./ I worry for the over-eager clover,// prodigious green on crepe myrtles,/ even for the early green of nut grass.

[B]y fleeing the city to live on the outskirts of nowhere—a place so far off the beaten path that even Duras’s aging Mr. Andesmas would have felt isolated—I was of course trying to escape from none other than myself.

Occasionally I will pick up a quarterly— As a budding poet, to do what I oughterly, And peruse the pages for helpful examples That I can crib or use as samples.

I was just sitting in the corner, stirring my stories with a straw that sucked characters out of bars.

But Jeffrey was flabbergasted and couldn’t explain to the officer why he was speeding. All he could manage to get out as an attack of Tourette syndrome hit were nasty, flamboyant obscenities. The Alabama state trooper wasn’t amused.

awoke in confusion, fear and hurt never seen before that day a year past

“You have no idea what your lives will be like if you can get out of the ‘hood. You could be driving Volvos, eating Tuscan cuisine, getting MacArthur ‘genius’ grants!”

I remember when I first came to California, I heard a mockingbird sitting in a tree, calling out in the names of other birds. It was down in L.A. I was staying at my brother's house in San Gabriel and driving in every day to the campus at UCLA to go to s

Normally, Aidan looked like a guy. A highly feminine guy, but still a guy. He wore his hair in a buzz cut (a turn on of mine), wore tight clothes, worked out so he had a bit of muscle, but nothing over the top. And he was my guy.

A pinprick breaks the black/ and pins the spin of constellations/ around its still point.