2800 29 23
|
Each death a sonnet, every grief / fourteen lines.
|
2221 24 21
|
These days, even God has a day job.
|
1932 18 16
|
|
3239 54 13
|
Once, an elephant contracted a sudden bolt of insanity in the streets of Ernakulam and trampled three children under her feet before she was shot to death. It took them seven bullets to bring her down.
|
3723 22 20
|
Paris was a better place for African Americans in those days. Josephine Baker sent a spray of roses. James Baldwin helped him find a good apartment.
|
3697 3 2
|
“Where do you want your mustache?” Melanie asked. “You can have it on the side, you know, or, if you prefer, across your labia, in which case it will also look like a cross?”
|
2877 11 9
|
An old man, a widower; living alone, defenseless. It was a given.
|
1921 20 16
|
It was Gatlinburg in mid July
|
2431 28 22
|
The fluffed-up clouds, darkish in spots,/
are moving fast, opposite the wind/
where I stand and look. Equations//
could describe the multiplicities
|
388 31 20
|
During the liberation, a Jew in the Russian army, asked him who had been the cruelest. My father gave them the name of the farmer who had murdered his father, and was later told the farmer's son was sent to the front and killed.
|
2077 15 16
|
When Carlotta left me, I cried / into my soup. I shriveled into / harsh mathematics.
|
2690 29 21
|
Why was it so difficult to move / toward anything?
|
2426 23 21
|
The night was a lilac bowl of darkness
|
2678 30 21
|
She slouched on one hip, scribbled on the order pad. “How do you like your eggs?”
“I like them very much.”
|
2371 28 22
|
I felt/
no need to show what I had made/
to anybody else.
|
2303 37 20
|
Make cartography with your mouth...
|
3348 16 15
|
A man and his wife are walking through a museum when the man sees a shield on the wall. Look at that! he says. Isn’t that remarkable?
The two of them walk a little closer.
What’s so remarkable about it? says his wife.
Well, the workmanship! s
|
2061 31 19
|
the mighty mountains sighed, and the wide seas heaved
|
2383 20 22
|
On the way over, on the ship, I met a girl from Cleveland.
|
1526 30 20
|
We are moments away from the end, and it feels like it.
|
3970 12 12
|
tonight's sky is full:/each lunatic to his moon/sings separate songs.
|
3031 33 19
|
7
My son has toxic epidermal necrolysis and the nurses who come in from the burn unit, 7 of them, the number 7 don’t you see the number 7 has meaning for numbers have meaning for everything has meaning and I sat in that sacred space in the ICU whe
|
3421 18 15
|
|
2461 47 20
|
She liked this young woman. They’d met two weeks earlier, when the young woman had been walking her pet chicken on a pink ribbon leash.
|
4316 19 7
|
the definition of beauty is easy
|
2541 25 21
|
I found the knife in a fishing box in the closet. The box was made out of varnished wood. My father’s father had made it.
|
2013 43 14
|
Tuesdays she worked afternoons at the bookstore, and he’d secretly go, buy a large order, sit in a corner with a newspaper. Fries covered in vinegar, veins of ketchup.
|
3167 23 16
|
Sue Ellen walked on. “You were thinking about me -- I saw you.”
|
2858 28 20
|
I was always too political, you said, with my Malcolm X posters and my DC rallies...
|
1461 37 23
|
in a puddle of water, the butterfly rests on a stone
|