Her dad regaled me with stories of his up-from-the-bootstraps climb out of poverty on the hard-scrabble, rough-and-tumble Lower East Side of New York, where he founded the leading supplier of hyphens to writers of purple prose.

The coffee cup was still full. Black hot steaming smoke signals climbed toward the ceiling, like blowing soot out of dirty bagpipe lungs. The mug exhaled constant and slow like the Fall, until room temperature crept from the handle around…

On the way to The Museum of Inner Light Expect delays Expect bumps in the road Expect potholes and such Expect a murder of crows Rolling acorns over the rooftops But what I want to know is who Who eats a butterfly On the way to

It's late it's early love youfuck me the difference isin the garage boxes sitbehind me in the trunklike passengers beside melike pedestrians in frontof me I choose our directionwhat stays what comes whatis what and how did I end upin the garage in the first placein the…

It was the early 80's My students carried / guns.

I never thought that I would be here

and even if you feel like you're all grown up, it's still okay...

“Hey, come on and sit down,” Jake motioned to her. It was three in the morning and after way too many gins the last thing Melisa wanted to do on New Year’s Eve was to chat with her ex-boyfriend. In fact if she had known he was goin

Can't cope.

She slipspaper thinshe ripspaper thin

They called him Hank. We piled in a car and drove up from Irvine to his little bungalow apartment on DeLongpre near Hollywood Blvd. for a collating party for this Mag he started with Neely called “Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.” No shit, that wa

Some things stay with you. I got off the bus, petted my dog, Nick and walked in our house and saw Mother at the kitchen table, crying and clearly angry. I asked her if she was sick. She works. She said that she didn't go to work today and might not go tomorrow…

She’s an old soul who was scattered to the winds like a thousand butterflies and a moth She has no center and flits from event to event and can’t miss out on a thing, because crikey, what if she missed something important? And the m

“Snobs,” our head housekeeper Denise called them in her deep voice, while peering out from under her glasses at me.

I have sat aside and entertained the coveted feelings of what was not in my hands. Only briefly, a moment shared of hidden secrets and joy. But of and between us, I cannot say that this moment is a considerable spur-still I desire…