America has given birth to many great poets--Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Muhammad Ali--but why should talented people have all the fun?

On their first meeting, when Hans rolled his wheelchair to her door she would be he first to say that her heart sank. But he was so beautiful and charming and funny and quirky that his disability was soon forgotten.

I had been in bed for a couple of days and by this I mean sleeping for fifteen or sixteen hours at a time. I don’t think that I believed in God anymore. I no longer knew how to stay awake.

According to the weatherman's morning forecast it was supposed to be a dark and stormy night. Unfortunately for Doctor Von Übel the weather had other things in mind...

I am not a gun, but I think I may have pulled a plastic movie trigger in some kind of real world action before, accelerated, pivotal scene, one way or another before, this new frame came into its paranoid view .You see? I am not a plastic water bottle,but I…

Okay, no freaking out. I mean, this isn't a suicide note. This is suicide fiction.

Doc and I talked for several hours. When I told him Mona was pregnant, he turned his head and looked at me. “Who's the father?” he asked. Don't know, I said. Mona didn't know, either.

Maybe God couldn’t find His bifocals, and that’s why my check for ten million hasn’t shown up yet. Maybe a stray dog in heaven ate my check. Maybe God went bankrupt like everyone else. Okay, so maybe at the end of life I’ll balance my checkbook. I do

She wants her mother back and all I can give her is this—over and over. She doesn't want my mouth, wants no kissing anywhere even. Just this. Like this—quiet and rough. Quiet because her stepfather is napping in the bedroom next to…

“I wanted coffee, not art. That’s why I came here, and the coffee here isn’t even that good. We should have gone to the place across town, their lattes are the best.” “How do you determine the best coffee? Do you think they have judges that go from sto

Every morning, the children dig holes for their parents. This is both necessary and beneficial: the kids need to dig and the parents have to be buried.

Thank you for submitting your epic poem I, I, I for consideration. While we are encouraged that you have relented from the ruthless self-endictment you affected so unconvincingly in your previous entry, Why Am I...

Ai thought she was flying at first, but she felt herself leaning on something. Before she could figure out what was happening, her eyes closed again, and had a short dream.

It’s always daylight there My brother comes running down the sidewalk holding out his arms and calling my name He’s wearing suspenders. He’s gotten thinner in heaven He embraces me warmly wanting us to be friends I give up trying to re

“Last night the Scots invaded Sweden,” I wrote, “to retrieve the silver filched from the Irish the Norwegians had in their coffers when Sweden conquered. The Swedes offered the Nobel to a Scots writer to keep ... the peace."