Explore

You smile into the phone static, the breath of your beloved.

Severe knobs of head and tail: one a horn of venom, the other masked.

I was only five when Dad told me I had died. “You drowned,” he said.

I wonder if those tiny computers in pigeons’ brains ever crash?

Her husband is away at the family cabin, and she is glad for the space.

We fed our dreams inevitable sins, the kind you lie about till you grow mean.

This morning drifts of sand hissed along the shore like mist.

We pull up alongside the great body. The fin marks the spot.

It wants to name the dead—without a name you wander lost in the sky.

We’d never had a cross word, but I’d never corrected him.

Wrung taut & tender at the soft play of fingertips, we breathe desires. Laughter takes refuge in bodies no longer coaxed to move. Nature becomes a thought.

Where will we go and how will we steer when the cars are gone?

What about writers who come suddenly into full power late in life?

What about writers who come suddenly into full power late in life?

If he could not evade a serious question by a joke, he bolted.

I hightailed it out of the hospital like my ex-wife was a prison I’d escaped.

I open the door and Eleanor is leaning against the wall, paper white.

I make a point of smelling the lilac every day that first week in May.

When the doctors’ voices started turning to noise, I didn’t fight it.

I live for now in the second house of having asked a favor from a friend.

This is a novel that contains more than its actuarial share of falls.

Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by his winter dreams.

I stop and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue, green, purple.

I was lying with electricity. I was already a story being told.

At the core, a daughter is a self-reckoning emptiness.

The slow-falling leaves contain the space of the story I’m pursuing.

You’re supposed to hit is the bull’s-eye, that black spot, precise spot.

At Pompeii the little dog lay curled and did not rise but slept the deeper.

She was painting a bedroom, trying to be a good mother, wife, Catholic.

give me a fish and I will make a necklace of its sharpest bones