1558 1 1
|
Summer bakes the metal playground slide to ripples. Still, kids line up. Sadists, all of them. Lucky enough to choose pain. Max feels it every breath, unwanted.
|
155821
|
I don't know what I'd expected from the week of mourning after my mother died but I sure hadn't pictured this marathon cocktail party. Our house is packed with people, food, booze and borrowed chairs. People I haven't seen in years keep turning up with casseroles.I'm…
|
1558129
|
I smelled the bleach of burst anemones
the sweet arousal of the Dungeness crabs
the seaweed of sour twigs and feces
|
1558910
|
When the dark shadows of his limp eyes told us life was slowly seeping away, stolen by his stroke, his wife signed the “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” order and, tearfully leaving the room, she turns, asking a final question, “Think a needy family could use his…
|
155892
|
A cloudy autumn morning greeted Sean as he stepped from the trolley at Grand Central Station. On his way to the tracks he purchased a copy of The New York Times dated October 24, 1934.
|
155843
|
When I met Gregor Samsa he was still a cockroach, erratic and skittish whenever the light came on. We often spoke in the dark. I empathized with the man. I mean bug. Ok. That isn't fair. You can't call a man a bug because he chirps and eats dried skin cells. A…
|
155850
|
"And then I, and I believe,
I alone, saw
this small child
run..."
|
155800
|
mis-placed
the change
she goes looking for.
her folks
missed another hour...
her worth-while spent wasting
the voice wouldn’t leave the leaves alone.
|
155810
|
Another noise, softer than the first: swish, thud. You are still. The house is very loud tonight.
|
155800
|
The young man pulls out his wallet, grabs a couple of bills and stops short of handing them to the bedraggled man. “So how do I know you’re not going to go out and buy some crack with this money?”
|
155821
|
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
|
155832
|
Sirens wake me, screaming warnings in the dark.
|
155887
|
he wound up hating the woman he betrayed in his heart for betraying him in her body
|
155887
|
...coming into that bone yard, you just hang a right, go on past La Fontaine, and take a left a bit further on. Jimbo's right up in there.
|
155873
|
Ginny, the mother, was a lark in every respect of the word. Born and raised in central California farm country, to a family of lower middle class means, educated in public schools in whose bathroom stalls she was deflowered as unceremoniously as a pig ta
|
155800
|
Every morning when he wakes, he lies in bed and waits for one of his toes to twitch or spasm; the moment he feels one of them thrust forward, he gains courage to test his legs. He grimaces either way: one more day of walking, one more day until loss, one more trip to the…
|
155887
|
By the sixth - Dizz, Falstaff buzzed - Croons - The Wabash Cannonball
|
155800
|
“She’s very sick. She’s dying,” and he smoothed my hair along my neck.
“It’s leukemia. A very rare type,” his hand reached my shoulder and stopped there.
“She only has a few months.”
|
155811
|
Andrew had learned the art of being a chameleon at school where his school uniform provided an exoskeleton. Beneath was no costume, just the fragile skin of adolescent ego.
|
1558108
|
He knows I talk to angels, what he would call angels. I don’t talk to him.
|
155752
|
The cold and the ice’ve really stoked a fire in those old bones of his. He runs with the gait of a racer, front legs straight out—each extension producing a crack like Jack London spitting into the cold...
|
155711
|
I dream about the boy in The Neverending Story, the gate of mirrors, and the Nothing, a dark cloud that floats in the sky, takes away everything.
|
155700
|
Bruce Springsteen begins singing from the loud speaker he was bruised and battered and couldn’t tell what he felt.
|
155711
|
The dance draws deeper
whirling witches weaving rhymes
The fire spits fierce in the falling rain
soon the spell will spill from secret times
|
155797
|
Jeanne and I were married for eight years. I never knew her.
|
155742
|
The first and easiest reason was that he never hit me. Well, if he never hit me, then how could it possibly be abuse? Never mind the threats to stab me in the neck. He was only angry. He really didn't mean that. Never mind he restrained me, or cornered me
|
155785
|
In the diffuse light of early morning you wear a sweat suit maybe and stand in front of a model-kitchen counter in a model-home kitchen
|
1557109
|
...clash of gulls
wend upwards, disappearing into grey
night's high tide recedes
|
155700
|
Won't speak a word against 'em. Car trunk stunk like bad chicken long after, but I won't speak a word against 'em.
|
15571711
|
...when they entered eager lungs hungry from deep and sweaty love
|
