2560 25 15
|
We made our escape on grimy streets under skies filled with crows, flapping like litter in the wind.
|
2560 17 9
|
I have been mother
to a hundred soldiers,
holding their hands
barely knowing
their names
|
2558 17 14
|
The first time I see her, she is slouched in a tire swing, pushing off with one foot and dragging the other beneath a dying pecan tree that probably hasn't made a nut in 20 years.
|
2558 14 3
|
He hunched low and forward on his bike, his 14-year old self, flying down the dusty back roads of this Great Midwestern Land, his head full of the smell of the algebraic girl he sat behind in math class just hours ago.
|
2557 8 8
|
Public voice when he's tense.
|
2557 12 5
|
“How much is stuff worth? Stuff man! Bling! Cargo! STUFF! What's it worth to you? It ain't worth a shit, man! Clean clothes! Comfortable shoes! A ride! Those things are important! But they’re only stuff.
|
2557 2 2
|
It's the way an earnest five-year-old boy pronounces every single letter as he whispers. Something about octopuses, something else about peas.
|
2556 30 19
|
He’s hooked on the pinball / excitements of adolescence
|
2556 57 27
|
She sits at home, on the floor of the kitchen, bathing her stuffed animals in molasses to match the ones on the news.
|
2555 8 4
|
Tell me your hero and I'll tell you what's cooking with you...
|
2555 9 4
|
I hate walking into restaurants and cafes by myself to meet someone. I always feel awkward, as if no one will claim me. I'm hanging on the threshold now for an agonizing few moments scanning the room until I see my friend.“Hi!” she says, waving her cup at…
|
2554 8 3
|
Figures are a strip tease.
|
2554 22 17
|
I stare, out a dirty window, / into the sanitary blackness.
|
2553 18 12
|
Exhaling slowly and deeply, Tyler settled his back in against the saddle of the tree's broad trunk and let it all go.
|
2553 11 5
|
Boys of summer in Yonkers played stickball and baseball.
|
2553 3 2
|
The pieces of bread dipped us humans in cheese,
the cheese made by cows from our milk.
|
2552 22 15
|
The Cheshire grinning/
moon cups itself to capture/
Venus should she fall.
|
2552 14 9
|
You can't always get what you want, and fortunately, that's sometimes a good thing.
|
2552 3 2
|
We are the generation who tattoo our stories on our bodies, who pierce what appears impenetrable; we fly our scars like pennants.
|
2551 12 11
|
I was having festive sex flashbacks and wasn't thinking sharply.
|
2551 9 7
|
This little town lost its mill...
|
2551 35 13
|
She walks through the house she’d bought. The filth and the stench of mould nearly make her retch. Dead fleas line the windowsills, the dressers, the floors.
|
2550 17 6
|
The Boys The Boys, they call my brothers in the neighborhood, or Those Boys. The Taylor Boys. Sometimes, Mom calls them Thing One and Thing Two, like in The Cat in the Hat. Those bad boys. Nobody has brothers like my brothers, kicked off the school bus, barred…
|
2549 1 1
|
The first morning we met—I remember the rain, soft the way I like it—was a series she later attributed as a fourteen-frame sunrise.
|
2548 9 8
|
I'm afraid to find out what my spirit animal is
|
2548 5 4
|
O’Malley imagined the blissful, narcotic innocence of Toby’s world where soft-shell crabs crawled into people’s mouths and hummed a happy tune as they were chewed and swallowed.
|
2548 6 3
|
We buried her upright, in the stance of warriors.
|
2547 8 4
|
I'm Icarus in Brueghel's painting. My wings as it turned out were made of wax. Mothers, tell your daughters this truth. You cannot fly so close to the sun.
|
2547 2 1
|
“He had emerged from slavery, -- not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness, -- but withal slavery, which, so far a human aspiration…
|
2547 36 6
|
I do not trust Shay anymore.
|