2095 7 4
|
She began guiding Penny’s arms, whispering movements through her body. Memory and experience sang through every fiber of their being. The song had become her life.
|
2095 5 3
|
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
|
2095 12 10
|
The coffins pile up gnawing dust on the glass panes to the rims of my binoculars. Shadowy cracks of stifling proportions, gliding over my eyes a requiem of mahogany. At dawn they heave between the workers’ hands, leave their resting places for a green tra
|
2095 19 9
|
I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked him if he had shot down any Japanese airplanes. He grinned at me. “One,” he said.
|
2094 25 14
|
Did we get Jihadi John?/
And the highway to Mosul?//
What’s the score?
|
2094 16 15
|
• Don’t confuse the virtues of bananas with the virtues of banana bread
|
2094 2 1
|
A pale face was illuminated by the street light. A voice rasped, “Charlie?”
“Do I know you?”
“It's Bill.”
The side of his little brother's thin face
|
2094 16 4
|
Somewhere along tomorrow, I will forget I have the right to do this.
|
2094 5 0
|
once wedding cake
under pillows.
now fluffy frosting
on squashed defeat
|
2093 1 1
|
A 1960’s of walking sugar beet fields to remove the rogue bolters by hand and on other days painting the ironwork of cattle sheds with red oxide. Then a 1970’s when the self-inking explosion of tattoos on his hands and then his body began.
|
2093 2 2
|
Most nights while in his sleep, with his one good eye deeply shut, the old man can hear the whispers of the specter in the remote wanderings, holding the surrounding woodlands in its snare. The sound of it closing in, with the bones of the universe crushing in…
|
2093 4 1
|
I think theorems and hypotheses
but all that comes out is punching and smashing
frustrated hate flows where I'd prefer to know love.
|
2093 8 3
|
When you last produced writing on a manual typewriter, was it before or after your first sexual experience, or maybe during? Manual or otherwise. Which do you recall with more enthusiasm...
|
2092 5 4
|
Often we sit in silence and age. We are observers of dust, fashioning ourselves into antiques.
|
2092 0 0
|
Azure walked through the fog as though she were walking to class. Her hands swayed through the mist and felt the thickness of the cloud through her fingers
|
2092 2 1
|
Standing hard at the windowCold clouds move, slowBlue horizon in the distance—It's just a slice of blue.All this beautyI miss it in the bitterness.I'm consumed by the missingThe emptinessThe unfairnessAlways some unfairness cropping upand capturing joy.Glancing high…
|
2092 10 4
|
"I sighed heavily. 'Goddamn it...' I spat under my breath. 'Every motherfucking time..."
|
2092 1 1
|
I rummage around to see which of our many countertop appliances might do the trick. Yogurt maker? No, I need something with more muscle.
The Cuisinart--just the thing! I pick through the detachable blades—where’s the isotope shredder?
|
2091 10 13
|
pluck me from the charred grate
|
2091 24 7
|
I watched as the light fled
from your eyes,
No slowly dimming lamp,
|
2091 7 3
|
My favorite was a red bowler, a man's hat, which I never dared wear outside my tiny bedroom. My three brothers wanted it too much to take that kind of a risk. They'd poke me with various sharp objects: the serrated edge of the bread knife, the rusted TV
|
2091 5 3
|
A strange and unexpected shift has occurred.
|
2091 23 15
|
proving little more/
than the player’s keyboard dexterity.
|
2091 11 7
|
He was her summer fling, the first cock to crow when the sun rose over her tequila smile.
|
2091 23 10
|
An Ayurvedic astrologer tells her that she is a child of India. Is a girl born in Indiana a mistake of just two letters on a Scrabble board?
|
2091 17 14
|
When you move to the music of a woman
|
2090 19 8
|
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…
|
2090 26 12
|
In her belief that Juni is lucky, Jade eases the horrors our mother suffers at night, not because Juni is stuck in a physical passion, but because the whole family and whole groups of strangers know what Juni is doing for sex.
|
2090 1 1
|
“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.
|
2090 9 4
|
And I watched,
from her warm bed,
the curtains dancing
in the window
|