My wife and I are cat people. Indeed, that's how we met. We met at a wake.

like the Bible in / Mauritania, like a mouse in a vial of ammonia, / like a retired coal miner on vacation in the Alps

Part of me feels like a wounded animal surrounded by hungry cougars. Another part of me feels like being mauled by a cougar might not be that bad. A third part of me wishes he could punch the second part of me in the face.

It's the outrage of the red monkey at her feet, And the nude thirteen-year-old woman sitting upright In the blue velvet chair, and the hints of blue at her navel, And at her lips and belly and crotch, that so upset Paris. Gauguin had his nerve

It was one of the first things she did after they opened the wall. That’s at least what she told me years later, more than 1000 miles from Berlin.

The porous bear the anchorite’s vial

He needed an editor for his Yale dissertation, the shifting borders between criminal justice and the internet. But the sex was inevitable. He was six two. I was blonde. I don’t think we liked each other very much, but that wasn’t important.

No, I just liked what it said "All at Once Is What Eternity Is" which seemed right to my seventeen year old mind, explained it all to me the way nothing else did. I matted the poster in art class and put it in a frame over my bed. Betty hated the poster.

During the day we search for truffles. I have a pig named Henry. He is a big help. He wanders the forest sniffing for truffles like a parable of porcine inquisitiveness. He knows what he is doing. He is not just a pig. Nor ordinary pig. He is a French pig

In another lifetime the loft had been a shoe factory and I joked how in the dark of night I could hear the ghosts of lost soles speaking in tongues. There was the rolling of eyes, and when I repeated the joke to my therapist, who was actually sitting acr

Let’s start with the end—death. Upbeat, huh?

Does the stuff at the dollar store really work as well as the stuff at Calvin Klein?

TEXT TO VICKY This sucks! Sorry for the teen-speak Vicky, but it does. You saw me in the hospital. It's just as bad at home. They still don't know what to do for my smashed voice box. I probably won't ever speak again. (Maybe with a mechanical thing lik

Some corners of the world seem to be consigned to an eternal hell of never-ending strife. The Middle East; Northern Ireland; the faculty lounge at Oxford University.

She did not know Robert’s skin was sliced and bruised from the twelve pound ball and chain locked to his ankle for sixteen hours that night.