“Life is on life’s terms,” she told me once. Her arm, wrapped in clear cellophane, was freshly adorned with a green-pigmented sand-dollar: a living shell.

My favorite lie is that he'd escaped the South Tower before it collapsed. Smoke inhalation erased his way home. Mine's better than mother's version: a stranger hurled herself onto him. The truth is when they stopped search and rescue, mother told father, Go. Even dead, his…

Jesus is for sale. But he’s heavy.

Palms planted firmly against his temples, Travis paced the room like a caged animal. Giant black bats screeched in his brain, their pointy wings scraping at the edges of his cranium.

I wrap my left foot

I supposed reluctantly that Princeton is soft as Macalester College is soft. A person could die just for having attended U.W.-Madison or Yale.

—Mazel tov, schmazel tov!

Row, Caps of white, A salted escape beneath reflected light. Brother, remember those old lies? I’m off to sea to make those things right, now.

I would open an eye, waiting for it to absorb the scant light in the room, and I would see her on the far edge of the bed, the topography of her hips now a battlement to keep me at bay.

. . . the empiricism of the mechanical had wound tight into her, lessons her few calendars could never impart without aid from sundials, hourglasses, clocks.

The coin, so little, the watch chain, the youth, the fading softening speech, each hand and finger, the panic modeled on your own eyes, the ashtray, certain stumps along the way, the long distance, the odd feather, the jazz rope gone,…

The aisle, nave and/ transept twist themselves/ into an auditorium.

Mark Reep is a faded Polaroid oracle taped to the only unbroken window of an abandoned house in Ithaca NY.

WANTED: a Muse. Former Special Forces solider turned poet seeking artistic inspiration. Brunettes preferred but blondes will not be turned away; gingers, however, are out of the question. Must have a voice that sounds like money, a self-destructive tem

First he wrote it in wet cement at the intersection: “Tad Loves Kimberley,” with a big heart around it. He was real proud, you could see. But then later on that year, the graffiti began appearing everywhere, on all the store walls: “Kimberle