1771 19 9
|
They line the bar beside me.
Talking about themselves and estranged children,
while rubbing necks and wrists,
searching for the pulse.
|
1771134
|
--How's the wriiting business? How about that thing you' was workin' on..."Gawain's Green Nights?"
--Yeah, well, I'm kind of off the soft-core...
|
177120
|
I’ll bring the naproxen sodium so we won’t have any problem grabbing things.
|
177134
|
Out the window is an empty birdbath, dry flaky concrete ring, no birds.
|
1771133
|
We lived in a Holiday Inn trying not to be depressed that life had turned out to be so much like Eastenders, trying not to acknowledge that the thrill we’d got out of each other was the thrill of giving in to the wrong thing. We had more sex than ever b
|
177194
|
Every morning, the children dig holes for their parents. This is both necessary and beneficial: the kids need to dig and the parents have to be buried.
|
1771136
|
You are a boy with a birthday bike smiling like our son, standing in a photograph surrounded by other sons, who turn rocks over and over, who keep snakes in plastic bread bags, who find the bones of something wild in the woods. You smile that way still.
|
17701517
|
born to be mistreated by beasts in human shapes
|
177000
|
The place turns out to have a really nice ambiance, and while the pasta is only passable—though I ordered, I believe, the cheapest plate on the menu, so maybe I got what I deserved—the background dinner music playing is "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" by Wilco.
|
177010
|
Hope wakes starving/
in the storm,/
to off and hunt.
|
17691511
|
It could as well be late night infomercials/
saturating the screen//
with medieval looking exercise machines
|
17692221
|
|
176910
|
A shoelace should know its place in the world.
|
176913
|
While I didn’t like to see Courtney swat smokes out of his mouth and admonish him, saying “Cigarettes. Bad. Fire. Bad,” her home was such a beautiful place, with its real wood and two TV and all...
|
1769122
|
|
1768116
|
You haven't lived until she dances just for you ..
|
176820
|
The specialist had kept what he'd taken out of Sue May. I made an appointment with him and was shown it floating in a jar of clean unguent.
|
1768189
|
I don’t name the dog but the fish requires a name. Animals that do not get eaten must be named. The dog is still on the menu.
|
176797
|
Should have washed our hands, we thought after, licking sugar-spit and dirt.
|
176799
|
feeling obligated to write/ is like feeling/ obligated to fuck.
|
17671514
|
I see those shoes and the status they confer, and I know what they cost.
|
17671410
|
. . . and the last thing you’ll smell will be new-cut pine.
|
17672610
|
maggots are small minutes in the trash i saw them
|
176663
|
Glen always had to be the first to fuck his sister, especially before that big galoot from down the street, whom Cheryl really liked to fuck, otherwise Glen would get violent. She had just started having her periods then, I remember. We were all there one
|
17661511
|
|
176673
|
Bike shops, vintage shops, after hour bar shops
|
17651412
|
My mother pointed to the soaring red towers, each with 600,000 rivets, she said, put in place by men like my Pa, by their sweat and arms as hard as balcony railings.
|
17651510
|
You wanted a love poem written just for you. / Here it is. Don’t look askance.
|
176500
|
[CAUTION: THIS CAN CONTAINS THE CAFFEINE EQUIVALENT OF THREE CUPS OF COFFEE. PEOPLE WHO ARE ELDERLY, PREGNANT, OR SENSITIVE TO CAFFEINE SHOULD NOT CONSUME THIS BEVERAGE!]
|
176554
|
I would be reduced to begging on the streets and hoping for a sign of her in soup lines.
|
