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"You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them out flat."--Renoir "Dreaming is free."--Blondie "I can't vouch for my ability to avoid dullness..the odd position in which poets find themselves explains their often-sentimental identification with the…
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The boy giggled, splashing his father and howling at the cold.
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Last Christmas Eve, my Nana shot my grandfather in the foot because he wouldn't stop boning the woman up the street. So on Christmas Eve, after Nana drank a bunch of those baby-sized Miller Hi-life beers, she went upstairs, got her pistol, and said, “I'm gonna…
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My wife tells me I should marry Pam. “She would be good for you,” she says.
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"Perhaps a divorce?" she continues, thinking of his thin, long hands and how they almost, not quite, but almost, made their usual pattern on her body, remembering having queried many men on what their most erotic sexual encounter was and found that the an
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bullet points about her soul
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The boy peered at the rather unusual place between the girl’s legs, which was entirely more complicated than a person might be given to believe should he see it, for example, bundled in underpants or a bathing suit.
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Her bulldozer of a husband died five years ago.
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I’ve paid my dues in this dimension/
so show me where the rest of them are
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When she was eleven, Margaret still believed in mermaids. She would fasten the neon diving rings that her mother gave her to her ankles and swim around in the pool for hours. By the end of the afternoon, with chlorine-swollen skin she would wince as she…
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Mark Strandover decadesa steady diet of dictionenlarged his heartone day it just burstRobert Frosta crazy ideathat he couldbuild a wallwithout mortar tookpossession of his mindhe piled stoneon stone higherand higher untilthey toppled overcrushing him beneath Wilfred…
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Why, I tell you, one run through that song, I’m always about to find my way out. But if this happens just two more times now, I tell you, I am going to go out and start something. You can’t treat a man like this. Even if he is smaller, like me. Why, I
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So they told him he better get ready to join the army because that’s where it was at, for him. After all, not everybody could split coconuts with their hands.
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Silent Murf was largely toothless, and the gaze from his eyes diverged in opposing directions; his skinny arms were a fancywork of jailhouse tattoos and what appeared to be scabbed-over claw marks.
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Why am I attracted to this girl?
She’s beautiful. Only five foot four, but still looks skyscraper tall thanks to those skinny greyhound legs of hers. She told me she used to dance, then giggled and said she hadn’t since she was five years old.
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I read the last line and close the book with a smack. “That ends that section,” I tell him. “Coming up is the chapter titled ‘The Ancient History of the Sewers of Paris.'
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Instead of julienning the fava beans you could, instead, slip your linen shirt off your pink shoulders and hang it on a tree branch like a white flag yelling “I don’t want to fight anymore, goddamit, this aftenoon is beautiful.”
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Maybe it's a suicide clock, counting the drops of blood on the bathroom tile. A cancer clock counting the number of good cells still willing to fight. Maybe it's a justice clock, counting the remaining days of freedom you have left.
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"A prostitute of the Hotel Khadijah in Rahab fell in love with my father...."
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She'd sit out on the back deck and dig into the skin around her toenails with a paring knife until it bled. He'd listen to a single aria of Opera's Greatest Hits, number 10, until the cusp of some feeling, either despair or rage, would build and fade. Then he'd start…
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You have arrived at the river, numb with the murmur of the city and the sleeplessness of anger, boredom, and too many people loving too many people too much. The heat in this night, not the moon as in ancient poems, is blazing; the moon is pink like the…
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She doesn't even know who wears the Adam's apple in this house.
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It was the end of a New York City summer, the heat and humidity thick all around. But in her body it was an unforgiving winter, the memory of pain always leaving her cold
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Grief is to have given freely too unfreely. Grief is to have given one year too many. Wicked is to have wanted it to be given away that way. Wicked is to Sam as duty is to Mother. Sam’s wife is to his friend’s wife as one Mercedes to another.
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Maybe the thing is over by now. They have gathered up all the pictures and mementos of our dad’s life and hauled them away.
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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.
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The water burst into droplets of rain and fell on top of her. Chisame laughed out loud, a joy that overwhelmed her as she repeated this feat over and over.
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Death came to my street, but I did not invite him.
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She was still alive when I started to write the story of her life, called Lucy's Story, about her recovery from catnip, but it was not the real story. In the fake story, she took the subway to A.A.
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