| 1569  1  2   
 |           In  the cicada's cry    No  sign can foretell    How  soon it must dieBasho                                      "Hear the  locusts?" The woman lifts the child's head. "Hear em, baby?" The  child looks blankly in the… | 
		
		
			| 2036  9  4   
 | You have been my woman’s lover now for
seven years, ever since your two souls met 
at La Isla Negra.  | 
		
		
			| 1950  6  4   
 | I put my arms around her and whisper to her while she plays the piano.  She wiggles and tells me to stop it.
 | 
		
		
			| 1289  0  0   
 | People act, today, as if there were no such thing as Death -  i.e. they "psychotically" reify the notion that we "live on" in our  work or more pointedly/poignantly  in our offspring and in society qua  Creation. This tendency was half present in the old Greeks - the … | 
		
		
			| 1575  1  0   
 | It’s the small stuff. Always. A conversation with a stranger, brief yet so connected it overwhelms you. These encounters can move me beyond my reality, little reminders that, if you just crack the window a little, something very special can blow in. | 
		
		
			| 1841  6  3   
 | the pollen of your kisses and the shouts of your love shaking the sky | 
		
		
			| 1743  6  2   
 | It was as if a car bomb went off in Beaver Cleaverville. | 
		
		
			| 1200  0  0   
 | Most women simply don’t want damaged goods. That’s a fact I’ve been brought face to face with throughout my life. It's something you can continue crushing your brains against, like an impossibly high hurdle. At first you take the damage without unde | 
		
		
			| 1828  13  7   
 | A team of reggae journalists played and an unknown man came after work for me in a kilt. | 
		
		
			| 982  0  0   
 | This girl who looks about ten years   old and her Pomeranian puppy are staring at my left arm and my right   hand keeps filling out the form and I know I shouldn't but I say what   she's been begging me to for the last half hour: It wasn't Wilbur. It   was a woman. A girl,… | 
		
		
			| 1553  3  1   
 | Dark hung over the night like an occupation force.  Across the street a Cuban diner fought it off with green and yellow neon lights, Latin rhythm beating through the air. | 
		
		
			| 2193  3  2   
 | We fucked in the backseat like the verse of a b-side, and that was enough to make him think my boys were half of his body. | 
		
		
			| 1733  2  2   
 | I know it’s nobody’s fault, and that one thing had nothing to do with the other, because it was this way for me since I was born; they just didn’t figure it out for a while that with one of my ears I could hardly hear, and with the other, I couldn | 
		
		
			| 2135  41  11   
 | He drove down there in his truck the second time. Didn't want to get anywhere near that snooty car of hers.
 | 
		
		
			| 2559  16  8   
 | The possibility for numerous outcomes –  the possibility of anything, really – lives on the writer’s page. | 
		
		
			| 1936  0  0   
 | The Sentinels flew low and through the woods. Carefully navigating their way around the trees, they heard the sound of birds chirping and frogs croaking in the morning. | 
		
		
			| 1715  9  6   
 | We married in the ruins of a pachinko hall, the tiny bones in the pocket of your tracksuit luring a pack of wild dogs out from the underpass. | 
		
		
			| 3171  23  16   
 | Sue Ellen walked on.  “You were thinking about me -- I saw you.” | 
		
		
			| 996  5  1   
 | the Coke made his butt leak blood | 
		
		
			| 1531  5  2   
 | I always sat in the backseat of the Dodge when my Dad drove, never in the front seat beside him. It was safer there when he ran over the dogs that wandered onto the road. | 
		
		
			| 1349  0  0   
 | my second language / to silence / plainsong of / the breast | 
		
		
			| 1049  14  8   
 | The diner on the corner is one of those Disneyfied modern cut-outs trying to mimic the actual thing but failing utterly. The street, a vein of hipness running through an Ivy League campus that is still trying to cling to a time when it all meant something | 
		
		
			| 1742  2  1   
 | If you know how, all bodies can be read like books, like poems, like scraps of song | 
		
		
			| 1752  3  2   
 | The ideas just came to them. "Nothing On" consisted of a television on a small stand, playing an endless loop of "Jersey Shore." "Shopping Bores Me" was a men's flannel shirt from American Apparel on an otherwise empty rack. | 
		
		
			| 2044  8  5   
 | Albert Walks         When Albert  walks he is astonished. Ripe fruit falls to the ground at his feet, offering  itself.  The earth's tremor  rumbles, celebratory, through his mended shoes and up his shins.  The birds darting through the sky above … | 
		
		
			| 2185  12  5   
 | A mile down the road, they found Denny’s. It was only four in the afternoon so there was no wait and the couple sat right away. | 
		
		
			| 844  3  0   
 | Oh, no! 
the lobster’s still alive 
staring out at us 
from the freezer 
at the fish shop 
sitting on top 
of the other dead fish 
and ice 
its large claws taped shut 
with orange rubber 
bands 
one eye stalk 
moving occasionally 
wonde | 
		
		
			| 4125  64  41   
 | I don’t read fiction he said dismissively and it was such a profoundly ridiculous denial of something so essential like saying I don't breathe air or I don’t make love or I don’t like music for fuck’s sake that all I could think to say in response | 
		
		
			| 1673  2  0   
 | They were starting to get winded. The boy, his father and his little brother were hiking up a hill, cutting a diagonal path through hay-colored grass towards an outcrop of craggy boulders below the hill's summit. | 
		
		
			| 1787  9  5   
 | Hair as black as a Raven’s wing. Dark eyes. You wore a black dress, too, my favorite color. |