But in 1991 Carmen developed a heroin habit and was forced to sell her powder blue, convertible Mercedes 500SL...

When I was alive with you inside me, I discovered briefly and finally how to fly. Up near your ceiling as I floated around the universe with widening eyes, like a butterfly, like a god, like a bird with golden hair at my neck, like a speckled moth infla

Do you know what it is to crave something? Of course you do. But this was different. This was beyond craving.

for Tracy ThornYou don't need a song about fixed stars, you needa reason to be glad stars are here. Themoon's always been around, but not always like the friend you want,until now. Don't throw it all away becauseyou are too sad to care. You've come into your own. Allthings…

We walk with our heads down, maybe 15 of us, moving under a sun that has grown to encompass everything. Everything is in hues of orange and red like a bloody eyeball on fire.

She laughed as she stuck up the word flaccid, it kept falling down

A kind of sucking darkness into A kind of noir celebration of despair

She told me it had been there since she was a kid, this large black spot like a blimp floating from her right arm up to the tip of her neck. She had really pale skin so she kinda looked like a cow strutting down the street.

The music is too loud in here and it's hurting my ears. I know some of the words to the songs because my older sister listens to the same stuff when she's in her bedroom and is playing her iPod and my dad yells at her to turn that crap down. I like my dad. He calls me…

It's lunch in the car time at 5:30 pm The car sits next to the mattress delivery truck in hope of receiving a blanket of shade

then something like a shark gnawing on a harpsichord. Her drum kit apparently is an entire laundromat. A pocketful of marbles spilling in rivulets, down a set of narrow linoleum steps, merrily as two warblers splashing in a birdbath. several octaves below

It was an unseasonably warm day in early spring when I first saw the man in the treehouse. The boys had just climbed onto the school bus, the older with shoulders hunched, weighted down with the gross unfairness of his early adolescent life, the younger still scribbling…

The world can still be viewed as a honey drop of sparkling rain, but not all washed up tears can be revealed as such. The stories swirling inside are constantly shifting their own gears, searching for the lost highway, and sometimes…

The gulls/ have somehow mastered the art// of avoiding the nooses of six-pack/ plastic rings

Luke and Diane sat at a round white table looking around the room. There were clusters of people forming an archipelago of cordial exchange and small talk. All but a few were strangers, friends and family of his sister-in-law Mary, now a widow, though the word sounded…