Conversation becomes Electra, as do her eyes. Electra’s head is grey, like the head of my Frau Freud, Martha. Her intelligent irises are darkly pigmented, and her sclerae are edged with a dramatic, black line of the sort that Cleopatra affected. In ou

On the very day I was fired from Penn State, in 1971, I was also kidnapped by a short-lived underground student revolutionary group who spelled their own name wrong. They shoved me into the backdoor of a yellow rusted-out car on Atherton Street, blindfolded me. A…

My brother Herb married his high school sweetheart right after completing college. This was a girl named Beryl, whom he'd met originally in Mr. Reinert's marching band at York High School in Elmhurst. I remember one day in particular in the middle of the

It is pain taking a form, Plato’s dream, born from your hands father that rejected me, giving me the color of abandonment, eyes dulled by isolation, a body deceased without life-giving touch.

When Kim handed me some of her husband’s condoms—“Here, use these”—out of one of their bedroom dresser drawers, could she sense the astonishment I was trying my best not to show?

Cassie cradles the loaf-sized phone – pinker than any girl – and dials. he's not wearing a hat says the phone and we all scratch our pencils on the boy-list.

It is no easy thing getting noticed on Las Ramblas.

Sally was bathing Homeless Hope in her bathtub when the phone rang in the kitchen.

with images overflowing with delicate thought scenes with nightmarish wet dreams

After work and wine, I Take some red food coloring and empty it Into my bath water. I submerge myself and open my eyes Like looking backwards at the world through A liquid sunset. I push myself under water, squeaking Feet…

Death is both alien and intimate to us; neither wholly strange nor purely one's own.

"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.'--Nadine Gordimer Other things do matter just as much of course. Of course they do. Hey I'm still kind of alive inside this poem here. At least I'd like to think so, so yes another…

I met Lizzie after her break up with Brad. Big-Dick-Brad she used to call him. That’s ok, I’m not a man, I don’t have penis envy, I feel sorry for men who can’t please the masses like a fruiterer.

by the time he's moves onto knives, she has appeared in next door's window: sliver of nut-pale belly, fingers wet with suds, nails painted bright as glitterballs.

After you started drinking your meals and hating politics I wanted to climb inside, live in your stomach and dissolve. I wanted to make you see, hold you captive with arms stretched, pinned. listen again, swallow…