And out on that lake that day you yelled “desperation please!” And I heard “desperate pleas?” I wondered about first impressions.

Even the fruit from the nearby orchard (which I, in part, nourish) batters my stone to rot.

Picnicking In Mt. Misery Cemetery We breathe the damp shade, plum trees shining in a woodland where there are few wrong things I want to remember-- the steel fence of the power company blazing under an arc light is one. On this day of ripening fruit …

The mind likes logic, but the heart loves chaos. The light is always on in Reality, isn’t it? Maybe I sought you out to make sense of my life, I don’t know. Maybe I wanted some sense that you were still how I remembered you (at least a little of you tha

The work of translation is a braid of light.

... and photos of friends from former lives: the Wolfman; Drac; the Mummy; my ungrateful Son; even my gold-digging, coat-tailer ex-wife.

Then I got another letter, but this time it was from my friend Andy, warning me that he’d seen Miller riding around with Lynda, driving her grandparent’s Dodge with Lynda sitting right up against his side, and his arm was around her. I saw red. I went

Forgetting fractures her body into a vast flower of fragments

You were given blame for action as experience by cause and effect now. If you take apart blame and even forgiveness is too rigid. She thinks of that purpose as to give men sexual destiny.

Spring break that year, (1963) I spent nearly every minute with Lynda. Her taste for sex was unquenchable once we’d gotten started. We did it in every position possible. The sitting position in the front seat of the car, which my brother Herb had to expla

Blood had soaked through his Converse All-Stars, and into his cotton sox. It was the smell of metal, of iron more specifically, that nudged his mind out from the fog of shock and denial, closer to the reality of his circumstances.

The courtroom smelled a lot like mold and it was hot as you could imagine. I sweated through my shirt and wondered if he wasn’t dying under his robe. He looked down at me from his bench and I just knew he was going to call me a commie and sentence me to l

“I was talking to kid who hadn’t applied to college, and I asked him why,” Branson says. “He rolled his eyes and said ‘Why go to college if I’m gonna end up a tool like you?’"

The ticking must have gone on for an hour before Kathy realized it wasn't a clock. When the line finally moved, the rhythm changed. When the queue stopped again, she glanced behind her and noticed a woman in torn jeans and a filthy sweater tapping a heel on the…

The manicured lawn rolls down either side of the knoll, punctuated with flat granite plaques, the occasional bouquet of cut flowers, a smattering of faded eight-inch American flags.