1994 1 1
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Stretch marks part my heart,
stretch marks part my body.
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199393
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Backs in the grass, legs straight, bare feet resting at angles, Rachel and I, both of us seven, looked up through the oak limbs that made black lightning cracks across a blinding blue sky. Three hula hoops sat trapped in the trees’ sprawled grasp.
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199221
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The tapping of hard soles moves slowly but forcefully away from the front door and toward the kitchen. Johnny looks at his dinosaur as if its spiked tail and plates of armor will protect him. Clip clop. Clip clop. The footsteps circle the kitchen. The bac
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1992139
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You generated coal light from your gait as easily as the new sun crawls through a sleepy forest, without worry over hot spillage, or who might be horribly blinded or grossly revealed or given visions in that rare moment of wet earth and…
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199200
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Ralph Simpson looked as though he wouldn't last through the weekend. His skin, yellowing from the cirrhosis, covered his hands tightly enough so that the veins looked like they would burst from the pressure.
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199221
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This is why people go into work one day with a shotgun. This is why people turn to the masses and drink Kool-Aid. This is one of the reasons behind Chuck Palahnuik’s conceptualization of Project Mayhem.
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199253
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Please stay on the line. Or don't stay on the line. We don't care. If we cared about your call, we'd answer it. Which, to be honest, isn't going to happen. We're going to make you hold. And while you hold, we're going to subject you to some really bad…
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1992146
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The winter following their son's death, Mr. Kelly's wife became absorbed by the tracks that ran in back of their house. At any given hour in the night, he'd hear her in the next room, their son's old room where she now slept, shuffling through dresser drawers. He…
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199177
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Hold your breathThe smoke here is thick, I knowIce underfoot, let it burn, let it go, but don't ask me to take your handYou have never been so patient as to sit and waiteven for the sun to riseWatch, now, here it comescresting over the hill as one large eyeboiling the…
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19911210
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Breasts don't make you a woman, but no one told me that.
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19912112
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I couldn’t begin to give an account of the latest days.
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199100
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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.
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19912116
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I always wanted to head on up to New York City and be taught by a decent painter, but as time kept on trucking, it became clear that that was just a big dream that would not shake out and I'd never be a real artist because I was shy of the money I'd need to stay up there in…
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19901813
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A woman with spirit appeals to men who fish because she is still alive.
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199032
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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?
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199042
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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?
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19901511
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When we're near, there is a black cloud, such as Sylvia Plath described in her unabridged journal, that semi-appeared in her rental cottage where she and Ted Hughes lived in Cornwall. The cloud filled the center of the room where she sat alone.
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198900
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Alysia lifted her head and felt Reya wipe her tears away. She looked at her friends and smiled a little. Happy that she was not alone.
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19891312
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She learned the difference between listening and hearing, between looking and seeing.
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198855
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The story will starve. It will crawl up your throat to get the cracker.
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198861
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Just like that. He heard her words clearly from the top floor of the five story apartment building. The unexpected change in weather made it mandatory for him to open his window.
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1988104
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Let's fuck like 20-year-olds, darlingwrap ourselves around each otherand fuck our way to the starsLet's cross that line between you and meand the stuff people pay to seeI know pleasure and it is thisall over me, you, covering,…
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19871711
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I fired God today. He wasn't showing up for work, slept through meetings, wrote ambiguous memos and killed too many innocents. Things just weren't working out.
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198793
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Our city is really two cities, conjoined. One lives during the day, the other at night. Those who live and breathe daytime air call the city by one name, a name which evokes the relative newness of the place, a name with words just barely invented.…
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19871514
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“I’m going home,” I answered, but the word home seemed inappropriate. I hadn’t told the truth and felt something, not guilt as guilt was far too strong, but still I felt something that moved me enough to amend my answer: “I’m going to the place where I gr
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19871313
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He stays a couple of yards behind me as we slog uphill. I try to diffuse the tension with a coy toss of head, slip on wet leaves. My ankle rolls and I splat noisily down. From my new angle his beard looks less stylish—bristles straggle all up his neck. He maintains…
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19862416
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The planet will be fine without us as it was/
when the Permian extinction made the goo/
that made the Rockefellers wealthy.
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19862719
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We are not alone, not as alone as we think.
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198600
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While Erik rubs my back, I fall asleep. I'm not lying on my bed in Florida - I'm face down on the pavement outside Brooklyn Pharmacy. And it's not Erik's hand smoothing oil of cassis into my skin, but that Officer Green's meaty one gripping me . . .
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19861711
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I would be proud to be your house rabbit. I make this case: I will listen flop-eared close to your every concern
and exhultation. If I doze off nudge me. I wake quickly.
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