On a street-lit night in Jeddah.

Dear Patricia, You look marvelous. You seem marvelous. You've added wonder to Oprah's life and that's no small feat. But, here's the thing. I was working on this short story about a relative trying to get in touch with O, one of thousands, except, this one, well this one…

My sixth grade teacher used to tell us all the time about how being poor is nowhere near the same as liv­ing in poverty.

It is your music that makes me want to crack open my ribcage and rip out my heart as it still beats, to cauterize my carotids, and shove the mechanical insides of a clock into my thoracic cavity.

Compartments trickle together/ in light diffuse and unreliable./ Fortify yourself against the day.

This time the bag's bigger/than the boy and the door.

Darkness was fast approaching. I stuck out my tongue at Naya, and she reached out as if to grab…

Now it's late. I am hanging upside down from a rope coiled around my crushed left ankle, the pain too sharp to be really felt, as the excess blood to my head makes my thoughts fuzzy. I am almost two meters from the rock face, thirty-five hundred meters above sea-level, the…

When Lois finally found him down there, Johnny was wedged between a large rock and the trunk of an old, long since fallen, cottonwood tree. She said as she got to him, she heard his gurgling breath, fighting fiercely to stay alive. When she saw the deep, gathering, red…

Reading at Menlo Park Senior Center, old people falling asleep leaning to the left in their chairs, all in the same direction.

Once you descend, the third rail/ hums its invitation

When we saw the window, we were impressed. It was so clean and transparent that it reminded us of a new pair of glasses, everything so crisp and clear through it. It looked on to nothing. Actually it looked on to the refridgerators and a few stoves, though most of the…

My father seems anxious about my gender orientation. I grew up looking like a boy, acting like a boy. He bought dresses and girly stuff for me but he avoided making an issue of it until recently.

About three dozen people, the doctor told him, dwelt in the small village until there had been a dry spell—a drought the likes of which no one in the region had ever seen before. Theories abounded as to the cause of the drought as theories do: a curse by

He brought me flowers once, three wilted carnations I put in water, though the sight of them made me uneasy. He brought me pictures once, too, of three sisters—ten, twelve, fourteen—straddling dirt bikes. He touched my shoulder once, as I edited pictures …