K is eating a banana. He says to me, "There is no end in the sense that God is dead, or history is dead. I would prefer not to play the role of a thoroughly useless prophet. I leave that to others, like Gene McCarthy."

I was thin and young. There's a kind of freedom to be found when walking around inside that kind of body, that allows you to have in this world what's known as a presence. People see you eating but they can't make out what for. You're not going to…

Marie knew that she should get out of the tub. She understood that Ellen was at the point of explosion. But Marie was too invested in imagining the picture she made at that very moment. As if through Benoit Doniel's eyes. As if it was a scene in a movie.

"Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,/The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors./I walk among them, but none of them are noticing."

Although decades have passed since I last tasted lysergic acid with diethylamide flavoring, I cannot fail to remember the tasting.

Bess spent the summer that year at a lakeside court in Lake Elsinore. They told her she only had to spend three months there, before she was allowed to have a spot of her own at the nudist camp. Just three months. But Lake Elsinore seemed like something

Every few days, on one of our walks, the dog and I go down to a shallow, quick river...

The streets have terrible breath, it’s said, and everyone hides but the young, who have slick, naked shoulders and fragrant tobacco shreds in the linings of their empty pockets.

He looked at the receiver in his hand as it hummed its dead-line song. His hand shook. Shit, he thought.

And now the McRib is back. Two dollars.

The Italians live on top of the ruins of Roman cities and medieval settlements, of the towns and villages of the Visigoths and the Vandals, gesticulating, fornicating, craving poems, like all of us.

The world moves its roving glass eye around in front of you like a dog trying to flip over a frisbee, as if trying to show you how the loveliness of all things here and yet there, from an anything goes, different, always shifting,…

Some folks say your hands can tell the story of your life. Well, my hands cain't talk, but they've made so many pies, I bet they could do it themselves if you cut 'em off and gave 'em the right ingredients, I sure do.

A wrinkled old woman sat at the table next to me. “Are you a writer?” she asked. “Yes, I am.” “Are you Jewish?” “No, I’m not,” I replied. “Where do you come from?” she asked in her broken English. “Chicago,” I said. “The Bohemian ghetto there, o

I had time to kill. I got on the merry-go-round, letting it go slow, thinking of starting blocks, how I might push off them.