1879 15 10
|
You wanted a love poem written just for you. / Here it is. Don’t look askance.
|
187921
|
One sunny day after Christmas Eldon went ice fishing with Grandma and Grandpa at Haymarsh. He was not fishing for Ice Fish but for regular fish who swam under the ice. Craig was there too. Craig was wearing more pairs of socks than anyone. He was wearing 3…
|
187931
|
“Tonight’s news begins with a Stone’s Throw exclusive. Intimate friends of hotel heiress Paris Hilton have confided that the talent-starved celebrity has agreed to marry Quaker Bob, longtime spokesperson and package icon for Quaker Oats cereal.
|
187952
|
John Lipkin took a drag off his cigarette and rummaged through his desk drawer looking for pot. There wasn't any. He remembered looking last night, but he looked again now. There wasn't a damn thing, just some stems…
|
18792115
|
“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."
|
187900
|
No matter the guidance and support she received from her parents, her psychiatrist, and her friend; no matter how hard they tried to remind her of her humanity, Azure believes this chimera form is her true body now.
|
18781311
|
He had her pinned to the back seat, expressing his love. Do you love me? she whispered in his ear. Do you, do you, Jimmy Dale, do you love me? His only response…
|
187811
|
May as well have lived two lives, he thinks: one before memory and one after. And how can you remember someone else's life? You can't. After forty years of living, he realizes that there's no way of knowing what his own eyes have witnessed.
|
1878114
|
Everything is illuminated. If anyone is watching, we look happy.
|
187763
|
Oh, also, had no idea what the whole visit to the Kingdom of the Dead was getting at. Interesting, but seems unrelated to the larger story. I'd cut it. Remember — this is a story about one man's attempt to get home. Stay focused on that.
|
18771311
|
that moon does not think (unless mineral thoughts) . . .
|
187622
|
His birthday buddy was like a wife to him: they were born a day apart.
This was coordinated, he believe, in the womb. Well, to be more accurate, wombs. She was due two weeks earlier but waited; he two weeks later but cut his womb-time (as the kids call i
|
187634
|
I’m going to stop there, before the darkness sets in.
|
187697
|
"... I knew Willie had gone— out the back door or out the side window. I knew he probably slipped over the fence behind my house into Lou C.’s backyard..."
|
18762012
|
I drove to you in April / and you loved me all through Illinois
|
187533
|
Hi, I'm Alexander Payne. I hate sex.
|
187543
|
I wriggled in the bed and felt the sheets soaked with perspiration. My arms were lined with tape and tubing, needles pressed in veins. I reached for the cloth again and again, and every time they stopped me. The hands that came were cold and hard, urgent
|
187521
|
Six weeks, four thousand dollars, and twelve hundred miles later, I figured I was done with the cleansing process.
|
187573
|
Forget Ulysses, life itself is a stream of consciousness if you ever have time to get out of the stream and take a look at it. And there’s nothing that gets you out of the stream like a short sharp shock.
|
187584
|
It calmed the guilt in my heart while kids reveled, laughed, and "made time" with the neighborhood girls on that final night of freedom.
No one would talk to those girls again.
|
187584
|
Mimi: Santa, I am so down with taking a number, but I really can't have you reading that particular story.
Santa: Let me be the judge of that. I am Santa. I give presents to kids.
|
187454
|
The tall, standing woman with bright red lipstick, elegant at one time, you could tell, responding, “She has dementia,” pointing at her brain. “She was a Holocaust survivor.”
And the one they’re talking about turns as she’s pushing her wal
|
1874218
|
I am standing in my neighbor’s back yard in my underwear, and my trash can is clean.
|
18741614
|
Snow sheeted on the river...
|
1873198
|
You would think when a bowl hits a tree the sound would be fierce, a loud clatter as stoneware explodes on birch bark dispersing shards in daffodils and grape muscari, but the noise is gentle, a thudding clink like empty bourbon bottles rattling hollow in…
|
187354
|
I am a sunflower. I turn my yellow and black face, bruised, to the sun, hoping its light will heal me. With my eyes closed I can see my stamen, veins in my eyelids, bulbous where they intersect. The sun feeds…
|
187342
|
Dale of the threadbare corduroy blazer and the same two plaid button-down shirts, of the unkempt beard and short-shorn hair and holed ears, the plugs overloose and then lost so that the effect was not a toughening edginess, but deformity, the same self-in
|
18731617
|
what smells like love may not be love at all
|
187395
|
I found my black dot nucleus. School got me in the 10th year with the numbers spilling outta my head, but now I got the cell on my mind. Everybody's floating around this joint all pink and green college clean, yellow face Japanese, or the jet-headed Greeks with their…
|
187301
|
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.
|
