1409 0 0
|
When we crossed the California/Oregon border, I had this
vivid image of sleeping bags filled with human bones. I shook
my head and the scene would not go away. The woods must be
full of dead campers, hitch hikers, run-a-ways, and black
teenage whores
|
140931
|
The whole scene smells like paranoia.
|
140954
|
I don’t even want to think about Aethra shtupping Posiden and Aegeus
|
140994
|
Fear I’ll be stuck here without a ladder
|
140901
|
Dina was a woman obsessed. She had endured a three hour layover in Chicago and another four in Heathrow for this. (The flight she had enjoyed with a few glasses of red and an HGTV show about plumbing that she could watch again and again.) She had staked out this corner of…
|
140945
|
I sat at
the vast graveyard
of broken hearts
on the mending fence
of wonderment
unsealing the silence
of the wounds
I began to put the pieces
together
like a puzzle against
forgetting
|
140920
|
Charley calls to say he hasn't heard from me. The blinds are gone, so I take a lipstick off the living room table and draw a circle around his head. I make a half-circle for his gut, a squiggle for the telephone cord. He can come over, he says, just to …
|
140911
|
I planned and planned. I followed the veterinarians around and I took vials of panda tranquilizers when they were not looking, and it was often that they forgot to look. The earth kept shaking, they were hungry, and many did not know what had become of th
|
140900
|
There was a bird on the windowsill, a sparrow, its silhouette backlit by a view of Uptown. She remembered many sparrows during her forced trips to Mercy Hospital...That was all over now...
|
140921
|
Macro-Microbe parked his car and proceeded on foot, which was a misnomer because he had no feet. Typical for Manhattan, no one gave him a second glance except for a homeless woman who tried to sell him hand-sanitizer. Macro-Microbe locomoted himself insid
|
140810
|
At six a.m. he was awakened by the alarm on the watch, and found he could not remove it from his wrist, though he was able to turn it off. Of course, she was gone, but had left a little patchouli-scented note on a pillow.
|
140843
|
YOU cross the park as the evening gathers, the playground is deserted, streetlights spark up orange beyond the trees that veil the main road. You feel your journey pushing at your back, the last scraps of the energy of a train hammering north. At the far edge of…
|
140811
|
"I'm just saying," the older man continues, "We oughta be ready in case she hits."
"We'll be fine," the woman says. "We've weathered every storm that's ever come through here just fine."
|
140874
|
I remember going out to a restaurant with some guy and a friend of mine who brought her little boy along. And suddenly her boy said, “I want to hear the man talk.” Well, that stopped us. Smart kid, I thought. He was fed up hearing her women friends talk
|
140881
|
Buck, naked, has no words. The best he can manage is a dopey strangulated cough. His wife, who is clothed, stands before him, next to the waterbed that took Buck half a day to force into the trailer.
|
140821
|
Okay, I’ll admit it, the earth was shaken on the world's underside, when you left for California. And I sometimes slept on the shores of Lake Michigan and Fox River for your tremendous thousand years’ charisma. To say I cried out in pain would be lettin
|
140821
|
He turned metal chains to rubber with the force of his mind. He prepared tacos for the paperboy.
|
140866
|
And pity us, this generation of sighing:
|
140810
|
Us kids in left field steal out bedroom windows after dark to pinch hit Lucky Strikes between first and second fingers, arc the glow of shop-lifted hot-boxed cigarettes over the chain link homerun fence sprawl on perfectly ridiculous grass passing a bottle…
|
140861
|
Minnie looked at her co-worker's nametag. "Destiny," she said to her. That's a pretty name. It suits you. You're an attractive young lady. Is your momma pretty?"
"Not like I am," Destiny said as she smoothed her shiny black hair. "I'm honest about it 'ca
|
140834
|
Dark morning sleet whitecrusts the world
once more, shrouds remains
of January thaw:
|
140821
|
“You think it’s a self-castrating suicide note or a self-righteous freedom speech?”
“Probably just the ramblings of a madman, pissed he lost a company baseball game.”
“Fuckin-A, Pete! Double-murder suicide for a baseball game? Ain’t nobody that craz
|
140831
|
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
|
140882
|
This is the poem you leave behind that you die in the middle of.
|
140883
|
The particles of dust didn't want to be looked at
|
140843
|
Reams of saggy bunting intersect the streets.
|
140800
|
Reverend Peter Roman could stand it no more. He stopped his speech. He felt a fire burning through him, a hatred for humanity and all the weaknesses of beings not perfect before God. He stood a long while, staring at the congregation. Then, he slowly spok
|
140840
|
She had endured three years of abuse for those hot, fleeting moments of tenderness—just enough warmth to keep her second-guessing the bitter frost. Now the ring promised a lifetime of biting back her pain.
|
140833
|
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.
|
140887
|
In the quiet dark, fathers reappear.
|
