2254 8 5
|
Watch me sleep. Say I'm lovely, marbled-white. Pretend my forest is other to me. Pretend I am what you have made me. The sugar-almond starlet. Your virgin. Your treasure to break into. Believe me unconscious. It is you who are the dreamer. Look how those thorny…
|
225471
|
In Nebraska, we found a dead man lying between the furrows of a field. He’d been there awhile in the heat and the sun, the only shade provided by a cloud of flies. The dead man lay on the ground, decaying, disappearing into the dirt:
|
22542019
|
if we stare into the dark long
enough, we see ourselves at some end or
beginning –
|
2254118
|
You’re the girl that would sneak out to poetry readings instead of parties, watching fierce semi-bearded men reading their poems from hand-stapled zines.
|
22541512
|
This is the best kind of crime scene.
Spattered like gore from gunshots,
I'm left covered in trace evidence.
|
22541913
|
old men with crispy sunburnt ears
|
225442
|
You like your life. Ducks march in a row. You've reached a certain age but you're strong. Healthy. You've got food, clothing, shelter. You have insurance and important papers. You don't have a man in your life, and you admit— Admit nothing. The…
|
22542117
|
There is a tall and leafy tree in our backyard. Also a bride, a groom, and a chicken.
|
225366
|
The light, oblique and waning, filters through butcher’s paper to reveal a body suspended in death but never decomposing.
|
225353
|
“I take him to see all those sexy movies,” she said, “because it puts the passion back in him. I love what he does to me when we get back home after those movies.”
|
225285
|
Albert Walks When Albert walks he is astonished. Ripe fruit falls to the ground at his feet, offering itself. The earth's tremor rumbles, celebratory, through his mended shoes and up his shins. The birds darting through the sky above …
|
225211
|
And here I am again.
I chew my nails. I tap my foot. I chew my nails. I sweat. I bleed. My nose bleeds. It drips. I drip. I'm dripping through my chair.
|
225241
|
His body echoed in the mirror/
cracked into distant images
|
2252175
|
I turn my head. Time starts running.
|
2251103
|
Several friends—hers and his—hung around the edges of their marriage, and it would be naive to rule out the possibility of a few stray affairs. The thought didn’t anger him; on the contrary it amused him as if it were some trivia question, the answe
|
22511614
|
ornery women / in tall hats, suspender dads, kids deformed with / ribbons
|
225163
|
I slide my hand under the sheets. It’s cool there. An impression. This is where she would be.
|
2251135
|
“The price of everything's gone up,” I say. “But I don't have to buy you chocolate if it's costing too much.” She says nothing and bends her head again, gnarled hands slowly breaking a family-sized chocolate block into pieces.
|
225085
|
That bottle just sits there in the closet, next to the hats and a box full of old gloves. Years it’s been there. Try as we might, we never open it. We just don’t have a damn thing to celebrate. Who was it brought that bottle into our lives and went and ruined …
|
225045
|
All night the moon had watched him, and he’d been unable to return its stare. Finally there was sunlight, and Joško took up his rifle and rucksack. He had trouble keeping his balance at first, but gradually his legs steadied.
|
22502422
|
But I came back around, after Robert Kennedy got shot, with one hand up your skirt and the other on the gear shift...
|
224900
|
One of the runners was collecting bags of dead animals to bring back to the van. Nicholas looked inside one of the bags, but all he saw was a stringy mess of fur and tissue.
The runner grabbed the bag from Nicholas. He shrugged and said "hammers.
|
224921
|
In the blue of the yard the twins boil and scrape,
twisting about beneath the sycamore tree.
|
224942
|
I lock the last of the beer and wine doors and head back to the cash register. Our clocks are not on bar time so I only have a few minutes. I check the till. A stack of ones and three fives. Enough to break a twenty, but looking bare. The parking lot's empty. The air…
|
2249125
|
by Bobbie Ann Mason and Meg Pokrass
at The Nervous Breakdown website:
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/mpokrass/2012/10/tweeting-war-and-peace-with-bobbie-ann-mason/
|
2249108
|
The girl put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in cupped hands and this was for comfort but she appeared symmetrical the way an etheric visitor might and the brightness was just then trying to find a way through an opening in morning dining room…
|
224842
|
“Can you do something about that those four stanzas of three lines each at the bottom of the basement steps?” my wife asked.
"That's a villanelle I'm working on."
|
2248183
|
Male genitals were usually portrayed diminutively in classical art. After forty minutes in a drafty room without cloths on, I was beginning to understand why.
|
224700
|
Before Ciel could ask further, Sora pulled her arm. Ciel turned to the golem summoner and saw the look on her eyes, a silent warning not to push Azure.
|
224797
|
Should have washed our hands, we thought after, licking sugar-spit and dirt.
|
