2533 44 26
|
Del and I watched my brother toe his way to the edge of the cottonwood branch that arched over the reservoir.
|
2533 4 2
|
So I walk behind Sandra’s desk and I put my radioactive tum-tum right up to her beaded dreadlocks and I tell her about the nuclear energy that is flowing through her right now. She laughs and screams at me the way I am sure her daughter does when someone
|
2533 3 1
|
I arrived at Yaddo, the prestigious artists’ retreat, in the summer of 1941. With America’s “day that will live in infamy” several months away, my own day of infamy began the second morning of my residency.
|
2532 14 9
|
... a moth,
a kiss. A silence.
|
2531 16 13
|
I shuddered. This is how we are chosen
by strange and silent hands.
|
2530 5 1
|
I remember the first time I saw her. I'd just pushed through the crowded bar and waited to place my order.
|
2530 20 13
|
I love to lie when discovered. "I'm your new neighbor." "The landlord sent me." "I'm the ghost of the girl who died on the 11th floor." "I fell from the sky." I wear billowing white dresses and a wide-brimmed straw hat that throws my face into shadow. Peo
|
2529 9 8
|
bullet points about her soul
|
2529 0 0
|
The lead man, who did not seem to be the most important or distinguished, just the one walking in line before all of the others, knocked twice on the door and opened it quickly. He stepped gingerly through the doorway and the others filed gloomily in afte
|
2528 19 11
|
Her bulldozer of a husband died five years ago.
|
2528 17 13
|
We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over vegetables and bread and not to indulge in sex with strange men—men were all strange once you got used to their distance—were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees.
|
2528 15 11
|
She sets the muffins aside, opens herself, nymph-like, mouth spread and gritty. She pulls the dirty edge of his gray t-shirt up so to show herself to him, spreads herself across the mattress like thin flesh oil over too much canvas....
|
2528 6 4
|
Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison—right now that’s all I can say.
|
2528 8 3
|
I pick up a pile of postcards, but all the pictures are of bees. There are close-ups of the bees and their perfect anatomy. My favorite picture shows the bees swarming, and I am at the center, their queen.
|
2527 26 26
|
Hers is the kind of crazy that can't be masked. She's worn it on her sleeves since tenth grade.
|
2527 19 10
|
I get what you want done from me. You want the old one two sucker punch that goes straightaway through to the tenderest part of the aching heart, the one that tumbles you out of your old worn out gut wrenching way of living life for…
|
2527 5 1
|
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
|
2527 7 5
|
This was a dream in which I didn’t know fear.
|
2526 15 11
|
|
2525 5 6
|
The man she loved did not love her. At first she prayed to Athena for strength and steadiness. She began to knock on wood, spit on her…
|
2525 12 10
|
1. The clouds and the shadows of the clouds. The early light, like the night undressing herself revealing pink beneath, underneath the glory and the intimacy like early love made of arms only arms fingers and…
|
2524 0 0
|
So, dear world, whose dearness I have never truly known, I bid you adieu.
|
2522 15 16
|
I forget you. Upfront: that’s how this ends.
|
2521 24 13
|
looking space packed right in up therelike a sun bleached kite stuck in between the several bluish colorsof the sky today has its ownamazing heartbeat. I can seeit clearly from here. Oh I can feel it reverberating for miles andmiles. If I look away it…
|
2521 0 0
|
She's a nurse, plugging leaks, postponing via triage. I'm an engineer, watching essential systems shut down as my body buys extra minutes.
|
2520 32 18
|
“Spare change?” he asked the couple heading into the cineplex. They glanced at his brother, saw something was wrong with him, then at him, noting his dirty and disheveled state. They passed without a word, not even a head-shake.
|
2520 2 1
|
A drag queen thrown from the mechanical bull Thursday night is my fault, they say, they meaning management. And because of the ensuing brouhaha and the ambulance and the medics and a thousand flannel shirts straining for a look, I failed to pick up Jenny, my six-year-old…
|
2518 20 9
|
When he turns around she has her top off and is climbing out of her skirt. "I don't like old men that much," she says. "We don't have to talk. No one will know."
|
2517 5 1
|
She comes and goes,gingerly at times, or, caution tossed,a headlong rushof foam and froth.No matter, I am steadfast,keen to be immersed once morein her salty splendor.
|
2517 6 6
|
It distresses me that I do not write enough. I know I’ve told you before that I don’t read, and it may be super-ridiculous to tell you now that I don’t write much either, but that is the sad catastrophe I with affection refer to as my life.
|