150 12 10
|
I remember how he’d mop up the oil from the sardine can with his bread and smack his lips together in delight at the taste.
|
72 5 4
|
she hides her stash in an old coffee can beneath a pile of chopped wood where the black widows plot revenge against the world
|
96 3 4
|
Janey smiled, her straight white teeth blinding bright, but Sam eyed Calico like a cat about to eat a fish. He looked dopey, she thought, but nice, yes, nice.
|
128 15 15
|
And your man with the tweed overcoat and trilby? Would you look at the legs on him; Shirley Fucking MacLaine.
|
112 7 7
|
These days, she resides in a facility in the north of the city, her once-curly hair now shorn gray on her dappled skull.
|
103 10 9
|
The world is a private one, the container of secrets and shames, of reputations and damage done over years, of stark landscapes and icy skies.
|
117 7 7
|
John Prine’s “Bruised Orange” plays in the small cabin as mosquitos swarm about the bare light bulbs attached to the outside walls of the buildings.
|
161 13 13
|
Afraid of open water, he swims only in the local YMCA pool, where he goggle-eyes the young girls and feels the weight of his fiftieth year pulling him towards the bottom.
|
111 10 10
|
Mary Magdalene might’ve given him a dollop of love for the terrible pain. There, my father remarked was a woman, a barefaced hussy, forgiven her sins by “a better man than I, Gunga Din,” he’d say.
|
96 0 0
|
The useless circuits of the dead
|
94 12 12
|
The swing creaked to-and-fro in the fog, the absence of a child telling everything except the why.
|
106 6 6
|
Nestor had gummed her ear, his hands pinching her flesh, the smooth edges of his molars flattening painfully the lobe. “Piggy, piggy, I love your skin,” he whispered, her back arched over the junk of dead wringers and fridges without doors in the city dum
|
116 10 10
|
Martha soaps my skinny bones and washes what she calls my "undercarriage."
|
72 5 4
|
Shite like Abba and the Brotherhood of Man got a fast fuck-off, whilst the J. Geils Band and Jackson Browne got deposited in a brown paper bag and paid for with cash stolen from whatever cash register I might have been in charge of that week.
|
91 4 3
|
Dairyman’s Child—the child of John and Jane Larkin—Measles
John’s tears soured the milk for all of Sheriff Street for a month
|