My name's Barbara and don't call me Barbie if you want to be my friend.

Love free of independence is a savage, hungry beast Phantoms grasping, sweating, gasping 'till her mind could not be freed

You know, my mother was afraid that I can no longer resist. She was absolutely right: My four sisters have all passed away before the summer shows its fruit. It was hard "said my mother”, not to see my flowers bloom. I, the calf of my mother,I came…

At the graveyard, the leaves had been raked into loose array....

Yellow Pages season is on us now, and Jimmy's drivin' a contract route. He'll head out to the San Joaquin where they print, and load ‘em in the back of his Tundra with the high side walls until the whole damned rig sags low,

“How’s the Pinto running?” Sean says. It’s been awhile. Maybe Darcy won’t remember him.

Shakespeare had red hair / Van Gogh never painted a nude

The cloudless sky/ amplifies the incompletion,/ clarifies the imperfections/ of the night’s normalcy-

When Uncle Dan got sent to the Alzheimer's ward, the ladies licked their lips. Fresh meat.

It's so far to get to where we aren't inthe way of someone's destructive progress.I'm only walking in my own gardensnow, but the big blue house is like an emptiedout envelope. I guess that makes this themissing letter. I don't know your heart's newaddress, but I once…

When we take Vengeance,/ shave and shower him,/ deodorize and scent him,/ clothe him in a starched shirt

The dog is reading. This morning, as every morning, the book is open in front of him. Well before his master's rise, he had already read the moon then dawn and the clouds. Now the slippers, these that walk here and there. Followed by coffee and the pages that turn. A little…

Why is there a heavy weight and a chain and a padlock in her woodstove? Because, she says to herself, slightly hysterically, because this is yet another thing that you must carry. Why? Because life is full of chains and padlocks and heavy weights. Hea

We argue on the way down. We bicker on the walk to the bistro. I get coffee and croissants at the bar and bring them back to our table, and she is still talking, proving me wrong, when I return.

I get out of the pitstop at the reststop, wade through parking lot hiphop. Hummers with Jesus Luvs George W bumper stickers, and a subdued slow hurricane of dour obese women in powder blue and tepid brown walking about the place like zombies. And I see t