Trunks of plane trees with parchment bark, their shaggy pillars bear a canopy of green like a great tent spread over the square of the park. Cool misting lawn sprinklers, their umbral spay--brick walks glisten in the mottled light. Fading blooms of rhodo

That night we slept on the floor of Kirk and Maggie’s apartment and listened to them arguing all night about art and life and love. Ah, me, I sighed, the sad soul of America! I thought of Walt Whitman. I thought of Allen Ginsberg.

I hate math. I hate everything about it.

My father's hands were huge. His left knuckles gashed as a kid when he rode his bike too close to a moving train. When his fingers fisted around a glass, the scarred joints bulged from his grip like blind eyes.

Jacob Obrecht, you are beautiful. Everything inside your head and everything you’ve ever made is beautiful and singing.

It scraped at Paul’s brain like a cat’s claw at the door. He hadn’t heard the song in years. Was that the Searchers? The Seekers?

Until millennia have passed and the world is dug up For future historians to ponder And through their meticulous disassembling of dirt They will find my book.

I find my mother’s pink Pyrex mixing bowl at the antique store on Fairview Avenue. It’s in the hands of a fat woman in a blue down parka, and she’s holding it upside down, squinting at the sticker on the bottom.

I draw your location on my thighs. It takes up both legs; it’s far. I think about showing you but something comes up. The phone rings. I tell her I don’t want to donate to the PBA.

The story will starve. It will crawl up your throat to get the cracker.

I came from the only flat region in the kingdom of mountains and fjords, and called the city “Down in the Dumps”. The beleaguering mountains smelled a flatlander when they saw one, and hated me right back.

for a handful of weeks/ my father took me to/ the college of art and design/ downtown/ where i took drawing lessons./

Disability is indivisibility—all of us could be its members—unlike its affirmative action forebears who remain underrepresented, even as the groups’ selected contestants prepare to retire early, a distributed group whose specialty is American anthropology

Highway 45N cost me four dogs when I was growing up. Actually, having our backyard abut the highway was the real problem. It got to be where I was afraid to get too attached. We lost Nicky,…

For two days, I bashed out words with grimacing fingers, wrenching images from my whining consciousness – a weak, lumbering, uninspired piece – and now for what?