1841 11 6
|
Down South now means August cold snap,
the forties roaring my wool cap
off my head.
|
184171
|
As I lean over the chrome rail and look at the floor on the street level of the mall, I ask myself a question. If I was to fall, I wonder if it would be better to land and lie there with my eyes open or closed. Closed, I decide, would make me look like I was at peace, open…
|
18413017
|
It was a surprise they put me in a dormitory, not a cell,
|
184100
|
The old mage said nothing. She did not even return the complement. All she had was disgust in her eyes as she looked at the grown men and women. To her they had no hearts.
|
184120
|
Her mother told her once: "Don't be no whore, Fe-fe."
|
184144
|
Rhonda looks guilty as it is, don’t you think? That hair! And the unhappiness smeared across her face like war paint after a war.
|
184160
|
"I was just coming home from work listening to Consumer Dave," said Murrietta resident Mick Baylor, through his attorney, "when my eyelids started getting droopy. And he was just talking about how Circuit City was going out of business and I was. . .well,
|
184020
|
Every day she loves me a little less, and justifies it by saying that there is less of me to love.
At some crucial, overlooked space in our life together, I used up my compassion and started to spend hers.
|
184051
|
“What about the other groups coming here?” I ask. “Were they asked what they wanted in these houses?” She turns and looks at me, like I've suddenly come onto her radar.
|
184022
|
Sloe Gin Fizz is pink
Bombay Gin comes in blue
I’m sitting here at Emerald’s
And all I can think of is –
you.
|
184011
|
nothing has ever happened in this or that or any other or maybe too damn many parallel universes. . . .
|
18401311
|
You'll be gone. I'll be gone. I'd hate to think how it was all for nothing, that all we did was stumble into a pretty big hole of our own making. The best place for a broken heart after all is in your own sweet chest. No one else…
|
184000
|
Sometimes I have really violent dreams where I smash Libby’s face in with a liquor bottle, a brick, a mounted boar’s head... really whatever my brain makes available to me. I always wake up satisfied.
|
18402211
|
He tried to call on his break but she didn’t answer. He imagined her on the floor, sobbing, like she’d been the other day. The grey rat would have chewed through a plug-in or some wires and started a fire. She would be ashes, a blackened corpse, reeki
|
183985
|
When I feel the sort of longing that sneaks up on me unawares, the sort held for the wrong kind of person that can make a woman clutch her heart in the night and sullies her blood with unwanted dreams in a thinking person's landscape, I hear, too, the deep…
|
183999
|
The last one I tipped over the edge was just like all the others: fragile, pale, humming to himself as he sat on the ledge overlooking the gardens.
|
183922
|
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…
|
1839167
|
He wears an old black tux, shiny at the elbows, and his gray hair has been styled and sprayed into a fragile tornado. On his lap sits a Chihuahua wearing a bridal outfit—veil and all.
|
183922
|
He had no leg to stand on and so what could he do but fall down, which is exactly what he did.
|
183855
|
Ishpeming straddles Lake Superior to Marathon, reaches into the water, pulls out a clump of frozen hotdogs, breaks them apart one by one, rolls them between its fingers, heats them on the thigh of its corduroy pants, and throws them into the sky. Comets t
|
183874
|
You cheat with a stripper--joke I told to your wife. I didn't know that she couldn't take a goof.
|
18382315
|
proving little more/
than the player’s keyboard dexterity.
|
18381313
|
My friend says there's some kind of bug that bites its mate's head off after they have sex.
|
1838139
|
He saw symmetry, exquisite geometry, body and built world in harmony.
|
1837179
|
I turned on the television last night, and one of the networks had a segment about a girl with no nose.
|
183721
|
time. Night after night he's up, restless. What if she knew his plans? If only he'd bypass his miscalculations and slip through
|
183734
|
We draw a treasure map in the sandwait for the waves to wash it awayI ask you not to leave me stranded hereIf I'm bound for hell, I don't want to be left behindThe sun breaks through the edge of infinityspills over the line, soaking the sky…
|
183763
|
“Now God,” Mr. Smashface calls me out by name.
|
183744
|
Back arching, spine twisted, muscles tense and turning. I am putting off my work. Jane Eyre is in the back of my mind whispering about childhood patriarchy and I am still clinging to images from dreams before waking; my last lover's face scrunched and…
|
183732
|
This is what my summer has come to: me, out of a job, aimlessly driving around the city looking for places to write, places to read, places to occupy my time.
|
