Was he really a Secret Service guy? No time to think now! Quick as lightning, Rachel bounded over the sleeping matron and sprinted up the aisle.

I noticed Sean changed after his grounding. We no longer played night soldiers around the block, no longer biked to the creek to catch crayfish he'd crush with his boots. Sean stopped hunting lizards, stopped charging smaller kids toll to pass…

whatever weaknesses you displayed// as empathetic human fellow traveler,/ your command of English survives you,// on into the last echoes of the human/ once we’re gone.

I have never known how gold this time of year, With its palladium arcade, was, of the trees That do not sense the pleasure of their silence; Trees are egalitarian, they do not speak But concourse among themselves, consent to join us At this moment breathing…

at the front of the bus/ sways a white-veiled woman:/ gnarled hands upon/ a bag of palms,

May is National Masturbation Month. How do I know? My pal Senior Sex Expert Joan Price is not only vigorously celebrating, but doing everything she can to spread the word.“I'm on it!” I assured her when she told me. “Thanks.”…

Frank cut the tip of his finger off and it sort of shot over to the lettuce bin. The blood pumped out in tiny jets as he covered it with the palm of his other hand and ran to the sink. He pointed it in the sink and turned the water on, he could see…

Dawn is a grey mass, what is left of the night's chill slips between my t-shirt and belly skin. Somewhere else you once wrote that being loved when you don't love in return equals rape.

Standing there as you walked away from me that late March afternoon, in the park off Meridian Street, the spring tableau seemed

The arid paramour, your breath is hot, dry, cedar. I sweat you corpus fluids and salt and the unnamably impure.

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 …

Love is easy. Lazy. Fickle.

I remember.

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

—Man, what a tearjerker way to end an interview, said Ben.