“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.

The next day we were sitting at that same outdoor café on the square, trying to savor a peaceful meal of duck plucked fresh from the Vltava River, when the very same waiter passed by and said, “Bet you wish you had some peeg now, no?” There were camer

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,…

When our body falters, deny us rest. When our minds crack under the strain, forbid us sanity. When we are too tired to fight give us war.

[WARNING: DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 'R XMAS!]

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.

Outside it’s still raining. We’ve gone through three cans of Guinness each. I’m waiting for drunkenness to germinate so that I can take him home and fondle what I imagine will be a very slim dick. A Slim Jim. When I chuckle to myself, he thinks I’m still

Just beyond the tree, beyond the fence, close to the grey clouds that hung almost to the earth, a boy sat on another tree's stump. Beneath his crossed legs that he moved up and down rhythmically, under his bright red, Superman shorts, inscribed in the stump, a symbol which…

I guess at the end you’re only looking forward. Or upward actually, since you can only lie there on your back looking upward, straight ahead toward infinity, your mouth in a grimace, with the ghostly pink lips peeled back from the teeth.

One minute Rudy was sitting up close to me, asking me how could Geppetto make a little boy out of a piece of wood, and the next, Steve was pounding up the stairs, yelling, "Carla, get blankets, warm clothes; we're leaving, we won't be back."

We pull up chairs. I breathe in her Bath and Body Works vanilla, read her paper slowly and aloud because the ears catch what the eyes miss. Her sentences are awkward, stilted.

I write poems.

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

It was two days to town. His horse could only go one.