Sheep are very philosophical, I hear. Stop this hopeless dreaming.

They think because you are a writer you are not much of a listener and so you begin to recognize all of the great opportunities to be much more of a listener and then you shut your trap and get sucked into the whorls of her big wet brown eyes with Italianate…

She talks about window treatments, how the place is maybe too much for one. Wants me to know she’s not much of a cook, and wants me to smell what’s in her oven and compliment her cooking anyway.

I would like to go back (with spade, pick, soft bristles), and sift through time and layers, brush away the intervening years, and find: the tooth, knocked out by my then best friend, when we were seven, careening downhill in my father's wheelbarrow on Boscobel…

...clash of gulls wend upwards, disappearing into grey night's high tide recedes

I recalled the one night stand I'd had with the girl one balmy summer night in Minneapolis. We lay on my bed in the moonlight, and I touched the nipples of her tiny breasts with the thumb and pinkie of one hand.

I used to be a poet, you know. / Better, in many respects, than you.

The doctors said, when she was born, that the gills would eventually fade away on their own. Nothing to fear, they said; no more unusual than the rare child born with a tail, or a dense pelt of fur, or a single sharp tooth jutting from its new pink gums.

Esmée sat alone at a table on the terrace at Marina Jack’s in Sarasota. She had been there ten minutes and no waitress had approached her.

Style Shifts “Oh, yes, my cousin. We were rude boys until the armed gangs started to gather. Used to be we could pass a night driving, playing our songs, acting tough. Yeah. We'd mouth off, flash some teeth, spark some anger when we felt like it. We…

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

a dozen girls with Encarnación's face flit past, whispering kisses along the part of my hair, tickling their hems along the cuticles of my nails.

Any form of exertion would defile what we are trying to do

At the conference her boss showed off his knowledge of wines.

You cannot go back, you cannot go home, you cannot cannot cannot…Only in memory is it possible to travel back in time. We all imagine it. We relive happy moments, sad moments, we exist, time exists and it passes. We cannot stop it.