What the tumbler meant

Minerva one night had a change of plans, for Mr. Wright knocked on her door in the form of a potbellied perv with a Vaseline mustache.

The steady sound of shoveling for the past three hours would have woken her, should have made her come to the window...

wrenched its lower back trying so hard to lift too many stacked November clouds off the newly shaved prickly heads of the slowly freezing trees,like ring weights,and had to spend the last of its hours setting in a small square box in…

The trouble began in October, when Ava, an embittered receptionist who worked at a small museum housed in a five-story Westside brownstone, discovered that the floors were littered with enormous grey feathers

We wore cowboy hats and jeans in the pictures. They both came off once his camera disappeared.

I always thought I would feel your hand, always, Lay with you as we flew higher together, laugh with You in the little spaces left between certain trees, like tiny blue flowers that only appear suddenly, made secretly Of…

Expose those for whom freedom is greed.

i imagined myself & i was phlox saxifrage pompom ranunculus poppy anemone ornamental onion rattlesnake red ribbon nerine & i loved the painted tongue & i wore the rattlesnake

My favorite lie is that he'd escaped the South Tower before it collapsed. Smoke inhalation erased his way home. Mine's better than mother's version: a stranger hurled herself onto him. The truth is when they stopped search and rescue, mother told father, Go. Even dead, his…

I read the last line and close the book with a smack. “That ends that section,” I tell him. “Coming up is the chapter titled ‘The Ancient History of the Sewers of Paris.'

I made you a playlist

In her blanched beauty, seated in a silver deck chair, with complacent socialist ways

he’s recognizable in the earliest images of misery: a hand shoving a young gladiator before the lion; the fire devouring a witch in Salem. And here he is. Again.

The night my husband became a transvestite, crows started dying. They fell from the sky like black umbrellas, hitting the ground with a thud. A rainstorm of birds. I figured it was a virulent strain of bird flu that drifted into the clouds and killed them