2215 28 17
|
If you outlive me, she said, it won't be because I smoke but because of what you put me through when you quit.
|
171 21 20
|
|
2301 21 13
|
‘I love you' said the man at the book signing.
He was one of the last. The shop was closing. The staff were starting to turn off the lights. She was sitting in the glow of a table lamp with her latest novel in stacks around her.
|
3699 21 18
|
On her lunch break, she dumps Luis for Daniel Towens, the ugliest man in the county.
|
1580 21 19
|
I once read a book of warnings.
|
1898 33 16
|
It was a year of red, white, and blue bell bottoms, chokers, and mini-skirts. It was not a decade of pink stretch pants, pink sweatshirts, and pink snowsuits.
|
1787 21 18
|
There can be no convergence./
There is only the talking that talks about/
an angle of sight nothing else can share.
|
3494 36 16
|
We sat under the broken umbrella, its flowered fabric hanging limp on one side. The rain fell softly at the edges of our backs. I kissed his hand, the one without fingers (not a casualty of his job, only of birth). My lips pressed what I couldn't say into his…
|
1737 36 16
|
A forgotten sprinkler is going in a neglected flower garden, water overflowing the bent wood borders and flooding the ground on either side.
|
2563 14 10
|
...what will happen to me buying drugs on the street, at night...?
|
1448 8 5
|
When the malady struck and the world fell dark at noon, she and I groped the walls and found our front door. Outside, bewildered, we heard the whine of jets in free-fall, explosions in the imagined distance. And we heard a car — or was it a truck that veered…
|
387 19 18
|
A pet scorpion.
A pet scorpion named Chris.(1)
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2732 23 16
|
Boxing Gloves for when...
|
1844 27 19
|
We are not alone, not as alone as we think.
|
1894 8 3
|
My resistance sublimates. There is a long instant of absolute relinquishment, in which I imagine droplets of water plinking into my lungs in a slow, musical fashion, like icicles melting in a perfect cave.
|
3131 32 15
|
He wanted to walk in, take off his scrubs, and not have to look at pictures of peaches.
|
1284 19 20
|
It was a pleasant time, my thoughts were mostly good ones, with little effort wasted on regret.
|
2381 24 16
|
tiny bits each one found meant something had blown apart. that someone was no longer with us. but somewhere that things were crawling towards unity again. another gun had been fired. would peace always start over? it's funny how it will. a hand…
|
3018 24 18
|
A landscape has the tendency to take on new dimensions when night comes.
|
2158 35 17
|
She said this is our abode and it sounded like a warble and she made a sweeping gesture with her arm and the boy started to cry.
|
1831 24 19
|
Now when she speaks to him, he no longer responds with an interrogative but rather a cheery, "You're absolutely right, dear" or "I'll get right on it," or "What a great idea!"
|
2175 10 7
|
Now, these explosions announced, political bribes and propaganda weren't going to be enough to push things through. There would need to be survival from blunt force trauma and fear tactics, a relentless forward march
|
2418 48 17
|
Every one of them will tell you I drank so much malt liquor I could barf up a distillery and that wouldn’t be a lie.
|
2374 29 16
|
Moving is like moving upstream, like swimming underwater against a mighty current. You are salmon people: pink, vulnerable.
|
2366 41 18
|
Tap shoes are the portal to the opening of heavens that will ignite me with the highest voltage of electricity, give me the gift I was meant for at birth. Prophecy.
|
2055 33 18
|
Chelsea's breasts are more the size of tangerines, but he likes them. He likes that she smells like Fruit Loops and that her front teeth overlap slightly. Her mouth is glossed. He slips his tongue inside.
|
2351 23 16
|
... I know all about ax murderers because Elmo, my uncle by marriage to my sister who never had any sense was one. He done killed six women in a farm outside of Topeka in the space of they say three minutes, including my sister and her bingo friends . . .
|
1660 17 7
|
After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.
|
2089 26 18
|
I am complicit in the darkness
|
3302 27 13
|
Co-written with Bobbie Ann Mason
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