Summer, Spring, Winter, Fall, the Good Lord made them all.

perhaps I am only being transported not for replacement but for repair

Most women simply don’t want damaged goods. That’s a fact I’ve been brought face to face with throughout my life. It's something you can continue crushing your brains against, like an impossibly high hurdle. At first you take the damage without unde

Falling asleep remembering lies that had been built around lies Lies to impress people Lies to make life more convenient Lies, I didn’t even know why I told them.

It was in his teeth. A blackness, a subscription to an outsideness, a painful contraction of burnt out trees scattered there among sand drifts and tidal debris. His face, lightly weathered and troubled, a tightness built into eyes of thought and separation. His arms, strong…

Ok, so I know this guy, he's a friend of mine. A good friend, even though I think he's left too big a tip on the bar more than once. His name is Frank.

I am trying very hard to rhyme, and trying very hard not to.

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…

This is the poem you leave behind that you die in the middle of.

On his way to his first fishing expedition in the Bay Area, the man remembered the rustle and shimmer of the willows by the muddied Jemez River in New Mexico, cold beer, the clean camaraderie of childhood friends. He walked along a path choked with greenery to the San Pablo…

The girl lifts my head, and I sit up straight once again. She hands me a pair of old work gloves, helps put them on my swollen hands. She wipes my face with a wet, warm towel. Her thin arms tremble. She cries. I cry.

There's no sky like that with twisting clouds shot up into by cypress trees that are so like dark green flames leaping out of the earth as if a dark green oily pool were on fire underground, and this was all that could escape, was its essence.

There are some I don’t recognize. My gaze lingers for a second. It’s bad business this.

"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."

A fat kid running; the sounds of an ice-cream truck —counterproductive.