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It's Part of the Plan

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...and on the eighth day

the heart would have unnatural reverence

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The heart would have unnatural reverence, exalted, bursting with evil, rolling in sloth, if it did not at once reveal its innocence. I saw you again, on the morning of the sun. It was you, or your double, or a son you might have had. Your beautiful bloo

O Starving Poet

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A novel is an idea that has Survived many severe beatings While a poem is a homely thing that was Never even asked to the dance Art Speak, however, is the art of Systematically overstating and Re-inventing the Obvious to the point of Distr

Cheap and Convenient

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Later, when she said she'd had miscarriages, I should have put it all together.

There is a woman

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There is

Ode to a Crow

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We walk in silence. We water our plants. We don’t eat as well as we should. We try to love. We try to forget.

How To Build A Drunken Sandwich

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Kick your employer in the ass. Emotions are strange experiments in honesty.

Little, Big Dipper

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I considered kissing Christian. It wouldn’t be terrible. I mean, it might be terrible, but it wouldn’t be awful. His teeth were a little crooked but he didn’t smell or anything.

Icehouse

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It was noon and cloudless when I pulled over next to the icehouse, wedged in the X formed by two dirt roads.

Sake

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I had the smallest taste. Liquid heat, gifted from lips. One long moment spent lost in her warmth. Fleeting. I should have drunk more. Would she have relented to one more sip? One final taste? “Be careful,” she…

Mississippi Burning

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“There are no inhibitions in here,” the postman shouted, gesturing at the dance floor with his Marlboro Light, the glowing tip aimed at a woman in a taut skirt. Leaning far forward, her hands nearly touching the plywood floor, she planted her feet and beg

Bringing a New Poet into Your Home

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You may want to pretend to leave once or twice, peeking in through a window from a darkened room, to see how they interact. Never leave a new poet unattended with the pack until you’ve determined that the new arrival has learned to fit in with the other w

Elevator Neighbors (from The New Yorker)

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“Do you think she paints?” “Her face, a little, But don’t you find her kind of bony?”

Texas

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Cleaning the dust bunnies from under our lives, Zin says she wants to move to the country, maybe someplace as big as Texas. She claims that lately she's having trouble breathing between bricks or talking to hot chestnut vendors with rubber faces. It's giving her nightmares…

Uffdah! (rise to a standing position) Oy veh! (settle to a seated position)

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Cameron Diaz

Hypnagogia

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The figure eight will fall on its side. Become infinity.

These Babies I'm Not Having

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They're haunting me with every spotting. They're convincing me they'd be the unexpected blessing. They're confusing me when I look at my already-children, taking on the shape of this one's face, that one's gestures. We've been…

Blog 9-15-11

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...my books have lots of swear words. So there's that.

Another dead chicken

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in the chicken house this morning. The second one this week. I carry the stiff hen out to the back pasture

The Vermeer of Shoes

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My flash kept going off. The museum officials are strict about such matters. Sans flash! Sans flash, Monsieur!

The Depth of the Dust

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Can anyone remember what the Great American dream was?

The Sway

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When it was sticky cool at night, he'd pull her hair up off her neck and spin it like a pinwheel. “You could be anything," he would say. “You could be a preschool teacher.” She waited for him to add, “For dragons! For wallabees! For…

Personal Trenches

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The headlines were my source of information and contact. Four Soldiers Killed in Baghdad read one. Seven Ambushed in Fallujah. I’d read them, look for his name, and maybe clip it out. It put me there; put me in touch with him.

If You Trace Even One of My Words

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with a finger I will (let you) know. If you mean even just one given look at the moon I will know that, too. If you peel off one lonely star and put that shining shell in your watch pocket for later or to skip across your sad …

Probably for the Best

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“Kids okay?” I didn’t mean anything by it–it would have been innocent small talk any other time–but he took up the suggestion.

The Horror

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It doesn’t shuffle, wrapped in cotton,/ hungering for love and tana leaves.

A short, nonsense story about colours, sounds and Big Mo

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And as he looked at the departing pink cushion in his rear-view mirror (shaped like a canoe without the paddles), the latest big question popped into his mind like a hot slice of buttered brown bread from his shiny, metallic stainless steel toaster –

Prairie Rose

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Every Friday night she gets liberated at The Haymarket Square doing a bunny hop or a do si do with ex-members of The Saint Augustine Women's Choir. She remembers how as kids, shy or awkward in dresses, their voices formed the harmony, the flight of something V-shaped…

Putin Flies!

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Rumors stranger than usual were circulating in Moskva. Naturally, they could not be confirmed, but they were making the rounds so thickly that they began spilling out of the capital. “Putin has become a superman!”

28

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The signal sets the faint young boys into motion