Pete told me, honest to God, that the first night he had that tortoise back home with him, he woke up the next morning bald. The damn thing had eaten off all his hair. So then Pete figured he'd strike up a deal with Clarence Magee, the barber.

You ran so quickly for a while no one could find you. Finally, you sent us a report. You had retreated to the sea, you had your legs stitched together, you became a mermaid and were applying to join the school.

"Bit of a shrinkage situation."

that day is my barking up and leaves falling down story, but in their elephant slowness it seemed no more than the regular run of the sun slightly disappearing here, and then maybe reappearing there, like a lost color way over the horizon, or the finally…

But I came back around, after Robert Kennedy got shot, with one hand up your skirt and the other on the gear shift...

You are lonely. Let me tell you about the smell of the rain.

I always have a serious expression on my face, am usually in a white coat and probably look completely unapproachable but there I am, and pasted in my scrapbook: Local Doctor Saves Another Life.

My other brother, Mike, has been camping out with the Carter boys down the street. For breakfast, he had beans, straight out of a can, and they were the best thing he ever ate. “These are the best,” he told them. “The best beans?” Joe, t

Some of the notes allude to how the ineluctable modalities of the visible and audible are transformed by the experience of hanging in a transparent egg half out of a B-17 at 10 thousand feet waiting to be spattered like paint.

"I am in frequent contact with you know who, and am able, most of the time, to surreptitiously send messages all day long every day, whenever I am inspired."

“Can you do something about that those four stanzas of three lines each at the bottom of the basement steps?” my wife asked. "That's a villanelle I'm working on."

That was the first time I went over the wall. No bird opened its mouth to chirp. No wind blew. I staggered a little on the stony edge. And dropped down. I changed in a cafe. Shaved. Emerged as that rare thing: a new man. My clothes were old, saved for

I came down with polio on September 15, 1953, a mild, smoky day drawing close to autumn outside of Chicago — which also happened to be the exact date of my parents' twenty-first wedding anniversary. Only six months later the Salk vaccine was already b

Your tongue is enlarging... wait, it’s growing hair. No, wait, it’s planarian flatworms, an earthy taste oozing down your throat. A terrible itching spreads from your solar plexus, under your skin everywhere. You know if you scratch even once, you won

Jesus will walk on the water. Judas will walk on a technicality.