She waited on the hot, broken pavement, arm outstretched, her thumb a ticket to a distant, refracted horizon. Waves of heat danced like undulating snakes under the spell of a charmer. She pictured herself passing through them, abandoning the green of home for the…

Over the electronic horizon at an invisible distance nuclear reactors melt like ice cream and release tiny black lines of radiation that wriggle in the air like worms

On the phone I asked my mother how she was doing. “I’m getting old,” she said. “Going slow. But getting there. I’m ninety-four!” My mother was always 94, when she was really 93. I remember she was 93 right after she turned 92. And 92

“What the fuck!” Duke muttered, amazed at what he was seeing in the darkened store. A thin curtain of smoke was rising from under the baseboard like an inverted waterfall. It stretched the entire length of the left wall. Holy shit, the joint's on fire! I…

I don’t see the problem. In the country I come from, language is the best part of the game.

Whenever Lady Gaga took the stage, We peons on the benches cheered for her: She dripped of jewels and paint, and blessed sage, Wore meat as the antithesis to fur.

As a kid he had run away from the family farm and shoveled coal back East to put himself through college. Now he was just another old man in a nursing home, desperate for a drink, his blue eyes bleary, a sticky goo filming at the corners of his lips.

A nuclear-plant fuel rod engineer, Dimitri Kastrotov, had an axe to grind, so invented an atomic deterrent, to counterbalance mankind. He targeted the filthy rich, greedy sons of a bitch, breeding war, weapons and nukes at a reckless fever pitch After …

Her friend had been drunk, and sometimes after two or three quarts of beer, he'd tell people that he was Jewish.

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

This is a very impromptu piece written at two in the morning based on a prompt from Meg Pokrass, who insisted the following words be used: fussyhairybloomingslipperyflutterdamppaleweedsyanking “Maxfuss” was his password, which was appropriate,…

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It must have been then and in those days and during that time when the grass and short brush, like so much amber and jade, emerged from the snow and the poet Li Po, who while traveling within the ten thousand crags of the Tanggula Mountains, looked up…

I love the notion of uncertainty-/ which seems inherent/ at the level of particles-

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.