Explore

He says to his boots, “Well, suppose we went for fish.”

We crossed the length of Iran to reach a lake so big they called it a sea.

The old hen scratches then looks, scratches then looks. My life.

I bled. God didn’t want to hear about it. He said unclean and so it was.

The meeting hall of their bodies piled on lawns caked with dying birds.

Tobias Wolff reading two stories aloud: "Say Yes" and "Her Dog."

i learned to save lives from a man who reminded me of my father

I walked that land with him, one and mingling, breaking into breath.

Into the storm, the iridescent cosmos. To the savage dances of sunset.

Why is the sun such a bad companion to the desert traveler?

It was only a matter of time before the damp of loss grew within us like moss.

At 35,000 feet, the center of heaven, in the deep Milky Way, we meet.

You try to confess your crime of turning the world into words.

Why am I always asleep in your poems? Look at me Ben, when am I.

Four wings of silk without a trace of dust perched upon a silken line.

What consequence is a body/a body nonetheless. If the light in me is gone.

It is cruel, this business of exile and divorce. I will not deny it.

Your hand on my nightgown, my soft places. I wish you wouldn’t do that.

Sound the flute! Now it’s mute! Bird’s delight, day and night.

There’s no need to check for a pulse, hold a hand mirror for breath.

The waves have heard of you. How you caress, how you kiss.

All roads lead to Rome, but all trails take you to Oklahoma.

My childhood is a city where tenderness was frowned upon.

Splayed toes adhesive on a whitewashed wall, ghost-tattoo.

It’s the human genius of reproducing not quite exactly.

Any good river should be fat, any good ocean should be worth meeting. A child won a hundred dollars by taking it from the tail of a muddy calf. I remember Robinhood too, but that feels like a different thing.

What I want is a woman who knows all the meanings of indulgence.

His voice was wrung with panic as he spit curses like spoiled milk.

A clumsy coyote descends an old hill of garbage. Death is visiting.

I must be led by what was given to me as streams are led by it