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

Her body shivered from the liquid and she felt loose. Her mind relaxed and a veil of pink mist covered her body.

(a sidewalk poem)

Because it seems never to be beginning, always picking up in the middle with it’s long resonant tones, which themselves begin as if they’ve always been. Maybe that’s why we love old, sacred music. And by we I, of course, mean my two-year-old Charlie and m

Within seconds, I strip her free of all that she wears. Her toes are polished the color of plump pink tulips.

But tonight the circus is dark. She is free to go to her lover, to embrace, to float in the night sky.

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.

So we waited for it to get dark. I smelled her there beside me against the tree, and fell asleep and dreamed of an unbombed stone church whose steeple was so high it pierced the clouds. It's time, came a voice from one of the back pews. “It's…

I passed Buster Keaton on the way to work this morning. He was standing, hands in pockets, at the corner of Riverview and Keil. It was the young Buster, handsome and still strong enough to pin down the scars that marked his childhood. This was the Buster

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.

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

There’s an oak tree in Hanover, New Hampshire. Twenty years old, it is still a sapling. I imagine that one day the tree will have a commanding view of the Connecticut River and Norwich, Vermont, where my mom sat in bed, crying, watching everything unfol

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.

He drove down there in his truck the second time. Didn't want to get anywhere near that snooty car of hers.

They always referred to her as the possum woman back home. She scoured the streets just as the sun fell into deep slumber behind the sentinel, sun tanned shoulders of the mountains encircling small town anywhere.