The store was closing for good, and so I purchased a book of poems by Cavafy, that poet of ruins and tombstones, and fragments from disintegration.

But Jana insisted to see this miracle, this antidote for the mundanity of existence.

Six months ago, Gary hired a goateed designer to "defoliate" the office, trucking out all the ficus trees and spanish moss to make room for curved sheets of fiberglass and, as he called it, "negative space." Now, her voice echoes off the concrete floors.

Gas station mart generic whiskey that smells sketchier than bathtub moonshine. Don’t worry about liver damage or going blind because you won’t be drinking it. You’ll need every drop to disinfect cuts and wounds since you and thousands of others in your co

My mystery woman smiles a hidden smile through her mask, and attempts to seduce me with her eyes. She says not a word, but brings up her hand and beckons me with the classic one finger curl that says, “Come hither.” Her eyes make promises, and she turns:

I cannot make love to a woman who looks like David Byrne.

The day after falling in love, I became unmoored from everything familiar.

She is thinking about her baby, the one she loved for exactly one month before she lost her forever. Now, all the love for her baby is coiled in the pit of her stomach and it has fangs and venom, and it is leaking into her blood, her bones.

August 14 I remember the smell of fresh air. The feeling of clean air in your lungs. I haven't had that feeling in quite some time now. I guess few people have.

Another thing about Dysthymia is how I get locked into a thought, a needle in a record of a song I can’t get out of my head, a song that drives me crazy until I hear it again, until I play it just the amount of times to where my brain is satisfied.

The Gothic-filigreed gate creaks as a guard closes it behind the little girl in the ruffled dress. Standing there in the morning fog, on the sidewalk outside the reform school, she looks remarkably like Shirley Temple. Dimpled, chubby face. Pretty, party dress. Her…

Can you see me dying? 'Not quite', Said Mummy, 'because it happens Very slowly all the time.

Even in the brief flickers where your eyes and nose are visible you look gelatinous. Like a forgotten traveler suctioned to the side of an immersion tank. Am I sick because this bizarre spectacle is irresistible to me?

She learned the difference between listening and hearing, between looking and seeing.

The birds were stacked up in the branches of a pine tree behind the feeder. Several were sitting on the fence. “They’re massing,” she said.