2149 13 6
|
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.
|
21481715
|
When you prime tobacco the old way . . .
|
214820
|
She spilled her neurons across the dissecting board of the violin, breathed deep and forced herself outward with every exhalation. Her molecules mixed with wax and horsehair, and her heart valves arched in unison.
|
2148114
|
Everything is illuminated. If anyone is watching, we look happy.
|
214892
|
"There's a concert next month," Sherry said. "Why don't you come to that and I'll introduce you? Then we can go from there."
|
214853
|
"I see a child's bicycle swarmed by bees. A stolen oil painting of a helicopter...no, no, that ain't it. Wait. A high school basketball coach will hang himself from a bridge you often think about. This man, now, he's a Navajo Indian.
|
214711
|
"How did you know he was a nobody if you didn't look at him, eh? Did you raise your eyes and look him in the face? Are you my wife or a whore?"
|
21473017
|
It was a surprise they put me in a dormitory, not a cell,
|
2147910
|
No one knows that, while the ex-Area 51 guy delivered his rant, Art Bell left the booth for a Diet Coke.
|
21472618
|
sooner or later you realize
|
2147119
|
I’ve had my face talked off by those types (and I’m sure you’ve met a few) who need to say and hear “special” words, and they go "unh-hunh, unh-hunh, o yeah, o yeah, unh hunh."
|
214673
|
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Skip says.
My husband laughs. He has a high girlish chuckle when he’s truly delighted. He can sing really high like a girl, too.
“All right,” I say. I leave my headband
|
214696
|
He told me he could feel an army of tears building up behind his eyes.
|
214698
|
my father has a phobia of dentists./ he also once felt/ that if the house ran out of toilet paper/ he would lose his job.
|
21463313
|
There was dad sitting at the table, wide awake, reading glasses on nose, pen in hand above a Doppler graph of numbers on paper, one of many now-lost theorems, looking up as his son walked into the room.
|
21461614
|
Snow sheeted on the river...
|
214684
|
He ate husks of bone and old paper scraps with yesterday's headlines, blowing down the street like tumbleweeds now at four o'clock in the morning.He wrapped himself in an old army coat against the November winds as he tramped back and forth, back and forth, up the ten…
|
214500
|
Mama Blinkey Lights yells at Papa Blinkey Lights and tells him to quit playing the fool, and when we turn our attention back to removing the shafts, we are chagrined to find that not only have they multiplied once again, but that they have gone yet farthe
|
2145109
|
I hear the slightly scratched voice of Joan Baez coming from
the record player singing about the junipers in the pale moonlight,
applause erupting like hailstone on a corrugated iron roof.
I am singing back through the bedroom wall,
wishing the
|
21451411
|
She was petite, pear-shaped, white, the girlfriend of a friend who'd done his degree in Russian Literature, but that's not the only reason I liked him. The husband I had for a while traveled whether he needed to or not and so I'd go with Julie and Phillip to movies,…
|
2145119
|
They kiss, opening their mouths into a smile, sharing a secret. Their kiss is so intimate. I blush, and look away embarrassed and a little aroused.
|
214431
|
A canister of unused laughter taken from the mouth of a baby not yet born
A splinter of wood from a cross, perfectly preserved in dark tea
taken from the belly of a dead Irishman
A milky vial of smog taken from the air of Los Angeles circa 1965
A
|
214430
|
I was crouched under a bruise-purple sky on a field of battle. I held a World War I-era weapon, an ancient black-iron spear with a spring, and I was told to load balloons onto it without popping them, and then I was to fire the balloons at some unnamed ta
|
2144117
|
When I got out I didn't buy a new suit of clothes, step into a bar, or bargain for an hour with a whore.
|
214401
|
I cannot remember what the celebration was for, but the baby was at its center. We passed him around, a sweet smiling boy about seven months old. The age when babies can sit but can't yet crawl and their thighs get plump.
|
21442118
|
There can be no convergence./
There is only the talking that talks about/
an angle of sight nothing else can share.
|
214472
|
There were a lot of advantages to having shoelaces.
|
214400
|
My father said that he had been ready for that journey for many days past and that he had asked often for the spirits to come and take him. He prayed to the god of the heavens and to the earth mother. He prayed for the three of us, and he prayed for the s
|
214400
|
I, personally, just had no interest in having some pimply-faced moron stick his tongue down my throat.
|
214332
|
|
