Make paddles of his hands Use his skull to bail Rig his thigh bones for a mast And his skin to make a sail

Chewing on peppered peanuts, thin flakes scattered carelessly around his squat, Father unfurls his turban and mops his clammy pate with an open palm.

I traced the vein that rose in her temple when she got angry all the way along her body until it ashed out varicosely on her smooth calf.

As soon as those planes hit the buildings on September 11, it was pretty much all systems go for Cheney's long-planned Iraqi invasion. But first he had to shitcan an aide who showed him in detail how Iraq would eventually…

I thought of you todayand what you put me throughthe time you saidwe couldn't rest.

Tiny skiers look like beetles/on a white bedspread. /We watch them fall to earth from/the high peaks and tell ourselves this is the week that sealed it

This day, oh, this day… shoved joy and gratitude in my face, then tossed in beauty and just a touch of grace. A Piping Plover set my sorrows by the side, nabbing morsels when it could, then racing from the tide. Junior Eagle perched…

She locked herself in the bathroom on our wedding night. That was my first clue that I had made a mistake.

“He didn’t finish ‘The Witchcraft of Salem Village,’” Scooter says, tattling on his little brother. I’m projecting him to be a first-round draft pick by the National Security Agency in about ten years.

In the small towns of central and southern Illinois there lives a very indecent sort of man.

Every year I have a birthday, and every year another of my friends succumbs to cancer or suicide. That's a shitty gift. That is devoutly not to be wished.

A sort of invocation of the open sky, in contradistinction to the dark of the Earth whence came the specimens, a figurative marriage of the literal darkness of exploration and the figurative light of knowledge.

On the ridge in front of them, appeared a creature, neither man had ever seen before, standing taller than their horses, the strange beast walked on two powerful legs...

Once upon a time I sat in summer chairs beside cool vine walls. This was in a borough east of the major city, where families gathered in seasonal joy, by blooms fragrant, to worship the summer and its might. There is nothing diminutive about the world when one is…

we ran that afternoon/across Bayshore lanes/into green blooming fields, beyond all those