He is leaning back against a pillar watching the dancing; a spectator to joy – both planned and spontaneous – that’s unfolding in bodies fourteen and fifteen years old in front of him.

At a rest stop in Montpelier, they stopped to buy Cokes and gum from the vending machines. He was showing off, trying to jimmy one of the locks with a safety pin but it stayed locked and she laughed at him and he said goddamn, look at all a them Milkyways

I made her a mix tape. It was revolutionary. Twenty-two songs she had to hear at least once in her life. I even drew some trippy drug-like designs on the label of the CD to make it seem more real. It was the ocean and the sun and every body of land balled up…

Juan’s tío, Richard, who works for the city and is the kind of Mexican who thinks he isn’t, took care of the lawyer. Juan checks himself in the mirror, didn’t know how good dressing fancy would feel.

I write poems.

Tomorrow, they'd bury their daughter . . . and still, so many questions. Why would a beautiful fourteen-year-old choose for herself such a horrible, painful death? In life, she appeared the antithesis of suicidal ideation: excellent grades, well-liked in school and…

When John wakes up, the first thing he does is run a bath, because his shower is broken, and while the bath is running he gets his breakfast ready.

She flew through the air, linen skirt billowing around her. Below, her buckled bicycle was taking a different route. Less aerodynamic than she, its trajectory was brief, crashing into the ditch. Elspeth kept on flying. Time slowed, and expanded

Margaret will take her seven away from his raging Irish hammers slurry Saturday night honks smashing red eyes. They'll board a secret train countryside bound where they sing the songs of her own dead Mam who lived poor in the world but…

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,…

o christ/ here you are again/ you sickness appearing in my brain/ pouring smog from my jaw/ my body hot and cold as though sleepless/ while i could sleep/ centuries/ undisturbed/ and awaken, tireder still./

A month before the real flowers came, amputated trees for 31 miles were festooned with pink blossoms. The petals were tufts of Fiberglass insulation shorn from houses incapable of withstanding 260-mph winds -- more than twice the punch Katrina delivered t

Three lines.

Velvet answered the door in a red leather dress that was made with just about enough material to make a wallet, and looking like a long limbed drink of water calling out to a thirsty man.

“We’re never going to get off the treadmill of paying ever-higher taxes," I said, "unless we get some creative suggestions from a professional bisexual tax advisor.”