Duffy struck an adversarial tone from the outset, offering up a first poem about improper expenses submitted by members of Parliament that ruffled feathers across party lines.

Gringovitch sat on the big leather chair in Olivia’s suite. Before him on a coffee table were the nude sketches he’d made of her earlier that day.

I keep the book when the lessons are done, go through the pages Momma skipped over...

Mom would dig through one of her music boxes to pick out Saturday morning's cleaning jams. Tattered, battered Payless shoeboxes with lids ripped to shit, filled to capacity with piles of cassettes; greatest hits albums, mostly, or Time Life compilations of mid-to-late…

Speaking in tongues untranslatable, they move in experimental spacesuits, uneasy in the other's gravity. (To say nothing of the difficulty of dancing.)

Jo was tailored, Amy was frivolous with ribbons and bows, Meg was plain and sensible; and Beth, who was ill and had no costume changes, wore the same nightgown throughout the dress-up session.

The weather, mid-sixties now, will take its toll on this singular voice.

"At a bare minimum it deserves to be a major cult hit."

Every spring, outside on the back deck, my mother and I have the same talk about how time flies, and she always waves her hand in the air as if swatting at a fly, but there's never anything there. She thinks the lilies will live all summer spread like a rainbow,…

Five micros

The boy in the elevator with round glasses, / who carried a newly-purchased broom, / was tall and burdened with clothes

There's one graveyard for the part-timers and another for the full-timers. Ours is a little nicer, but we're still all going to hell. Do you remember St. Petersburg? No, you're memory's not that good.

Next morning the thought crosses my mind of snapping Mom’s neck, making sure she’s dead, and then running down to the sea to drown myself.

Goodbye comes in stages. At first you recognize that you will “miss” someone when they are gone. Then you have to accept the fact that they are leaving. And finally accept the fact that they are gone; and not particularly in that order. If only it

In the tumbled-down now there's too much material, culled from pretty boys that don't notice me and tattooed ones that do, and I'm certain there's at least one dreamer soaking eyes into me who knows all the twisted lyrics invoking pretty little horses.