you cannot simply burn the past and expect it to stay burned forever

You slid out of me, ectoplasm, and I let you.

A woman with fallen breasts is attempting to hang her laundry on a string. Two tall men mount horses and ride them into the meadow. A squad of children wrap themselves around a playground.

I'll still want the blinds open and the lights on, to see the papier-mache of our flesh fighting death away to the century mark, even if you only want to live until a ripe eighty-two.

She came from a small town in Illinois where most of the residents were under house arrest, having misplaced their sliver of luck.

...to know they are not alone

My wife’s got dangerously good Peripheral vision She can see things so far to the side That I’m almost certain she can see things behind her And I’m sure she can see things that happened yesterday But the thing that scares me the most She

The single halter that I have -- a candle, or a torch, though fulgent -- is no solvent to absence. I eat in silence; I take, finally, like some communion wafer, a thought on my tongue, and swallow the cusp of evening.

Not sure I remember what's important, but I remember you. That's the whole problem I think. You're a drain where all my words end up ending up. All of them get lost inside you. Eventually. And I'm left with nothing to say. Because all my words are gone…

Lela, my grandmother.

"You had to do something back then, so I joined the Coast Guard!" he said, as though anybody said both. "My mother got us evicted!" she said, neglecting that this means homeless and ruined.

Let's put a cork in this drain.

I leave the 29 to go after the 1

old men with crispy sunburnt ears

We are a city of overworked workers.