Human, you said, Comfort me, at this the end, Life so long, and smiles so short, What will lie beyond the bend?

It is a strange world, dawn. You may find yourself alone with your God, the old, and the young. Very likely a bird. An old one out hobbling past on a cane, a small dog trotting from bush to bush, sniffing a pile of leaves, jumping back, st

They talk but they don’t really / talk

Most times a vertical word balloon floats before him.

I think of particles exploding, coming back together like some physics experiment I don’t know the name for. “Large Hadron Collider,” you say. But that’s not what I mean.

He was her summer fling, the first cock to crow when the sun rose over her tequila smile.

My Grandma caressed my sleeping Grandfather’s feet as we sat in his hospital room after hours.

A shoelace should know its place in the world.

She walks through the house she’d bought. The filth and the stench of mould nearly make her retch. Dead fleas line the windowsills, the dressers, the floors.

Clare sits bolt upright in the hard plastic chair, warily tracking every passer-by. In her lap, Kim’s hair is damp with sweat, dark blonde curls melting against her flushed cheeks. Clare absently strokes the length, soothing both of them.

Priscilla Mainwaring has a little surprise in store for her husband Dan. “I’m going to greet him when he comes home on his 50th birthday wearing nothing but Saran Wrap,” she says. "The Cling Plus kind, not the Premium."

Hours later, we fell out of a helicopter like hunchbacked wingless birds.

The boys finished their laps and returned to the center of the gym, Hamid shuffling up last, as usual. Amid the T-shirts and shorts, he wore faded blue slacks and a grubby, long sleeved dress shirt. He always dressed that way, even in gym class, as though

was yesterday’s dawn breaking in the high sky/ meant for us?

Things had started to fall apart. And not only things — things that were meant to keep other things together. Three zippers in two months had fallen apart. I needed to connect.