As I was reading “Not Your Mother's Book on Home Improvement,” a new collection of light-hearted essays by (primarily) middle-aged female do-it-yourselfers, it became abundantly clear to me that, unlike the women who tell their stories here, I am not a…

I call upon all cashiers in dungarees... I call upon the baristas in rags... I call upon those whose sinister principles tax the weakness of their conscience... I call upon all those deracinated by dreaming big...

Azure understood now. She felt it there as she remembered what she told Sora after her ordeal with the domed creature.

By lunch: The dryer is an F-5 dervish of mismatched socks, blue jeans and your yellowing college T's, lovingly held onto. For a moment there is a comforting warmth and softness to their smell. In the debris strewn landscape of the living room a carcass

...the woman of the sun, twelve stars around her head, the moon at her feet.

machine utility of thought, intangible aesthetic of sentiment.

Somebody left CNN on all night long until the news cycle flipped, crashed and burned in its own ruins

For the camera she smiles otherwise not and only when she is standing beside him But for the camera? for the crowd for posterity yes For their children for the future? yes, again yes a thousand times until her face be

I imaged him at his mother's house, eating chicken and tabouli with her at her round marble table, leaning back and laughing, then reading my “love you” and excusing himself to cry in the bathroom.

Once a friend asked me to write about rape in an email, so I wrote that it is a weapon of war that would not work here because partners do not give in to it; in fact, they would say it is infidelity in relationships.

a soft wooden clatter, wind-battered reeds/bound to the banks of ditches rank,/ill-purposed waters slide into low swamps/whose waters into rivers seep and crawl.

Flowing, Flown In the field stands a jealous man with fifteen eyes stored inside the cuffs of well-worn khaki pants. His pockets pull with clinking dimes…

The Campus Socialists Paul and Mary Jo lived in an apartment at the top of a long, dark flight of stairs that were so high, I remember as if it were yesterday thinking, the night she pushed him down the stairs, he would surely be dead by the time h

We both looked toward the house. We could just make out a light that was barely visible coming from the side where their bedroom window was. Slowly an evil grin appeared on Darrell's face. He looked at the knife in his hand. "This will do it!" he sa

My mother should have been a minister or a peace officer. Instead, she was a homemaker who ran the home like an agency. There were certain hard and fast rules.