An ice block heart rushed home to the beat of its melt.

I walked her home. She lived eight blocks in the opposite direction of me, but it made her smile —I made her smile.

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.

It had been Tom at the wharf who strode over to greet me, his friend Tom with the small spectacles standing at the bar. “Write it when you get home,” Bella said. I was wearing the same beads.

Fridays always said it was time for golf,which left me wide, wide like the space between your teeth,on the stoop til you'd let me share your palm with your nine iron.I was a utility. Your gap toothed divot tool or a headcover that had your smile.Sometimes you'd gawk back,…

China refuses them politely, politely in that Communist way of saying without saying.

Martín stood over the slow, labored panting as if it were a mystery he could not explain. The dog lay on the frayed pillow bed, a knot of fur and skin, in his father’s office. One eye, like an almond floating in milk, stared up at the boy.

xxxxxx

Which well-known Portland celebrity did I at-first-unwittingly accost at the Aug. 2007 Thermals show, hitting them up for $0.50 so I could get a slice of pizza ?

I learned to love what we had: the long, bright days, the water all around us, and even their slithery bodies, which somehow never dried under the pounding sun.

We do not say to the fish, “How do you pronounce your name?” For its name is long and colorful, like the rainbow. We can pound the kalo plant into sweetened poi before it answers.

A poison bouquet of Merlot and brown floor muck bloomed in Seth’s nose. It’s one thing to sniff a freshly decanted red and another thing to shower in it.

The calls were going through her as if her whole head had become a wireless receiver. She absolutely did not understand how or why that was happening, but the physical evidence was impossible to ignore.

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.

I’m at the kitchen sink washing down pills when they bump up my driveway in a blue Toyota pick up, its bed eaten through with rust so bad I can see past the holes in the body to the frame.