My eyes don’t close but hers are shut tight, and something inside tells me that to this girl, I could be absolutely anyone.

She could see him doing these things but she could not hear him.

I will show you how, in the spring, the sidewalks here look like a crossword puzzle resting under a glass of lemonade,

men sitting on stoops women earning the rent by working as servants in the rich folks yard

‘A whole damn plane is missing and the only damn clue we have is a 9mm bullet,’ Picasso said to Victor Bravo whom he calls Torv. He’s his partner at the Picasso Investigation Agency. They questioned the guard assigned on the night of the plane

"Possible candidates for reading to a crowd" the subject line of the email to myself read. You see, writing can be hard - or writing can be easy. But writing for a crowd you'll see is something else entirely.

- Never in pain and distance - Frown on these moments, With bitterness and vain

They found your athymic neck/clipped like a bag of Skittles/and your lifeblood left a Rorschach test on the dash/in which they saw the future/and their own exits/(straight ahead and to the right).

When he leans back from the telescope through which he had been looking, he sports a derby and a Hercule Poirot moustache.

Ten-year-old Bobby Akins learned that a shotgun shell struck on its brass end with a hammer can indeed take out the left eye of an eight-year-old brother observing the proceedings close by.

Accidental suicide, though. Why, that could happen to anyone.

I think we could be twins, our hands hitching us together like paper dolls, our parkas making blobby round balloon shapes as outlines for our bodies. I imagine each of us holding onto someone else, and the line continuing on from there until we have a cha

Always in a hurry/to spoil your/weekend

Swatches of Chinese silk in vivid red and lavender fly through the air. My granddaughter in her mid-thirties reaches for the cloth. I see in her mirror a shape forming; a slim, gray haired woman with a spring in her step. I pause to admire my reflection and pass over the…

Long ago, this painter Brussegem had hung the dark mantle of Outcast Artist” over his shoulders—and over his life, he formed a strict philosophy—Art and Only Art—and protected his solitude and artistry with all his moody might,....