949 1 0
|
It was ridiculous. We were only in 3rd grade. How can anyone know at that age, only eight, that Judy F. was the girl he was meant to be with for the rest of their lives?
But that was how Stephen O. behaved. As if they both already knew this, and they
|
116810
|
He is underneath them. His head is like the head of a worm.
|
149820
|
A bank bag now hung from those teeth—yellow-gray rancid, decaying teeth, strands of tobacco chew laced in between. Those thin pen mark lips could not hide the teeth’s keyhole spaces, shaped by open cavities—the bank bag hung from those teeth. The me
|
99211
|
Most days you couldn't win; the constant nag from the fact that it was all a game was your only comfort. I was at the unemployment office again. The gal at the counter'd seen me enough to know when the printer was out of ink so she could walk away.
|
104511
|
Now that you can go to a body shop and get nearly any mod you can imagine printed and attached in about an hour, every cracker-ass redneck is sporting a twelve-point rack...
|
153500
|
—with spinster goddesses in the middle of things / circling looms.
|
110910
|
|
110911
|
A rose and two dollars. Where did they come from? I didn't know anyone who had visited my parents' grave recently, yet that evening I saw a white rose on my mother's side and two bucks on my father's. I took the money and placed my own flowers with the rose. It had to have…
|
96011
|
"Take the other arm, Jonas! Take the other arm," I said, laughing. "Make me a better god!"
|
117711
|
After years of unsustainable binge spending and a global economic semi-meltdown, most people have had to cut back on their expenses. Many folks are struggling to make do in this new and bewildering economy and we are all learning to live on our means, rather than beyond…
|
105420
|
felt as if someone had pulled me in by the belt, or grabbed me by a knot in the hair, and kissed me with fire-engine lips. I was happy. I was in love.
|
146330
|
The others fell silent and cast glances back and forth to each other.
|
96030
|
I turn the corner and come face to face with Ed, who's stark naked at the kitchen sink. He chugs a glass of hot tap water from a measuring cup and belches loudly. “Good morning,” he says, as he pisses in the sink. “I drink 6 cups of hot tap…
|
113110
|
I'm waiting for your voice. My trembling hand is so damp the phone could slip from my fragile grasp at any moment. Each ring burns in my ear and makes the washing machine in my stomach tumble faster and faster. After three rings, or it could be four, or forty, I hear…
|
80111
|
Man on aisle nine looking for the answer to cancer
Will the partially clothed couple on aisle four please put the rest of their clothing back on
If you are finished doing whatever it was you were doing?
Man on aisle five trying to imagine
Whil
|
116410
|
For weeks I hadn’t been able to think straight, waiting to lay vision on those majestic, swooning breasts.
|
158920
|
The pizza was perfect, ingredients genuine, not artificial: crust charred slightly; cheese gooey; sauce steaming, requiring careful eating lest the mouth suffer burns. Such quality was becoming rare around town. The product in Manhattan, by and large,
|
84310
|
Jerry peered out into the dark landscape with no fear left.
|
120410
|
But oh my goodness ladies and gentlemen, out from under the vast reeking field, under this generation another generation has been rising and they are bursting up out of the soil of corpses they were boiling under there all along and they are bursting up o
|
87911
|
artifacts gone obsolete / miscegenating in suspension
|
119021
|
I remember sitting there on the first unfinished rooftop, watching you building houses out of words. You hammered in grammar and punctuation; you said these things needed to be hammered in by hand. You drove the long straight exclamation …
|
87210
|
Watch the moon hang with methough miles and miles apart.Over sea and rock and railwaysforever in my heart.
|
100610
|
For you, airplane wings said 'life has not been kind here'. Kind, like what was missing was tea or as if we didn't clean our windows properly. There was that time when, stood in the kitchen Rupert saw the fire. Flames lapping at the gate of…
|
120911
|
The night is very clear and unusually cold. We are so near to the star that its light banishes the darkness that tries futilely to extinguish it. A small village twinkles in the foothills to our east. The cry of a lost sheep cuts the night like a blade
|
134910
|
As I was checking out with the receptionist, Dope came barging through the door and told the guy at the front desk that I needed to be booked for this sonogram “right away, like within the next 72 hours.” My hands started to shake and my lower body b
|
103120
|
It was the most prestigious cashier position in the entire state!
|
81910
|
If you were a painter,
and I a poet,
we could have conversations
about Picasso and Bukowski,
and how neither one
took a sober breath.
|
117011
|
Stanley had a crush on Sarah. They were in Ms. Goldman's freshman chemistry class together fifth period. That day they were working on homework at Sarah's house while her parents were gone. Stanley was in heaven.“Break time!” Sarah woke Stanley from daydreaming,…
|
115320
|
Charley calls to say he hasn't heard from me. The blinds are gone, so I take a lipstick off the living room table and draw a circle around his head. I make a half-circle for his gut, a squiggle for the telephone cord. He can come over, he says, just to …
|
61210
|
I once knew a guy named Ian from Manhattan
Who liked looking at New Yorker fey cartoons.
|
