Joseph and his little brother, Kevin, were there again. Kevin was too small to understand what had happened yet. He would usually just go off, running around the statues and playing with the wreaths; the last time they'd visited he climbed a tree and broke one of the…

In the end they talked a lot, shared what they could, both seemingly trying to rekindle something that was no longer hot, and yet they could not let go of each other. Year after year would prove that. Right then, just then, it seemed that the physical par

Ah we just sat on the flat roof of the school and looked out at what was beyond because sometimes there is nothin' to do but sit on a flat roof of a school and look out at what is beyond. Going up there I had told him to be careful with the bag because if he didn't take…

The diner on the corner is one of those Disneyfied modern cut-outs trying to mimic the actual thing but failing utterly. The street, a vein of hipness running through an Ivy League campus that is still trying to cling to a time when it all meant something

She arranged to have an abortion at a doctor Greene’s office, who practiced out of a converted house on Solano Avenue on the north side of Berkeley. I took her there the day of the procedure. You couldn’t go to a regular hospital to have this kind of thi

She says, “He's like, the eighth wonder of the world.” She says this without irony, and this makes you feel embarrassed for her. The laughter in this small, smoky space is getting louder. You chew your chapped lips and put your…

It makes me feel like a dirty old man: adorning Celia, Making an offering of my blue dresses, adorning Celia.

Imagine this: One day you are walking down the street (wearing your protective mask, of course, the cloth one you bought the other day because you liked the color and design) when, by chance, you happen upon a strange sight.

a random sticker that says, Repent Sinner, and a club lineup snaking around the corner and sirens and that urine smell at alley's mouth

a white rabbit with a dirty monocle and a straw hat regarded marsha from the grass at the edge of the mud.

My dish was slut ("all done" in Swedish). It tasted good though aroused no draft, of mutton, for example. My grandparents' bed held flat. I filed alone, in realist kitchen, reading Froeding, standing, striding, continent as gym.

They were once a crown,of some living stag -- not quite old,not quite young: now bone. Something at the cusp of its age. Here they stand, given by a loved friendon a place in my home; smelling, whenI get very close, of time. They are shaped like small…

You can have two threes, or three twos. I hear the beat both ways. It goes back and forth in my head, like magic, transforming from one to the other and back again. And I am learning the basics of music theory, and painting geometric shapes with primary colors. I am…

“Help me,” the man said in his mind. He lay beside the folding camp stool alone in the middle of the woods, in the clearing where he and the dog always rested.

Lulls, and the gulls, amid the tides and their tears (And I join their voices and my heart is run), Though each or neither takes no part in my fears, I join no hands with the beach or the years (And the ships slip near plus yon). Held handfast,…