Authors
We were alone in the world, and we had left dear ties behind us.
Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.
The roads have come to an end now, they don’t go any farther.
It’s so delicate, the light. And there’s so little of it. The dark is huge.
The world is a riddle of shape and texture, from sight to smell to sound.
Kids interfere with perfection. Wives interfere. Marriage interferes.
He sobbed; he said he would go to therapy, stop drinking.
What felt like sanctity now felt like nothingness, like death.
We’re fat! So what? They hadn’t yet tired of this chant, the play’s refrain.
He had come to weavers’ Harris to make some testament.
A finger on the bell, a quick sprint on light feet, and then stifled laughter.
She did not leave him for the sailor. So why should he be angry?
Raised in a dust bowl, she had broad shoulders and a
D-cup bust.
Progressive stages of revision eliminate incidence in favor of essence.
It’s not clear that Hemingway completely knew what he was doing.
If you’re going to take a degree, take one from the best school you can.
Art touches the soul and moves life in ways that commerce cannot.
E. L. Doctorow noted that writers seem to get business ideas almost right.
However hard you try to make amends, they will still condemn you.
However hard I trudge and search I cannot find the hills I have climbed.
There was only the gulf of our steps, our breathing brittle as string.
When push comes to shove, I can get downright Aeolian on you, son.
He had seduced them with his sincerity for truth-seeking.
He twisted like a weasel in the sack, lashing backward with his fist.
The blade was buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye.
Gravity bends together this planet and your life, made of glass.
At night the wildfire swelled the blurred interior like a lung of light.
A dead body leaned sideways against a wall. Its eyes were open.
He had looked on it a thousand times and it never failed to kill him.
The hymn that’s resurrected from the hymnal aspires to the spiritual.
At Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau clicks like on the “Wilderness” page.
Our eyes searched for the island, but ahead there was only overcast.
Collage what we can, form fractured and repaired, blend of is and isn’t.
Your face is a grain of rice, one small nothing on the world’s horizon.
Put out to pasture, flop down into clover, alternate to the glue factory.
When we move together in the dark I can almost get to him but I turn back.
Fletcher was a squad leader. He ought to be able to get a girl.
She is very rich. She will leave me everything when she dies, he says.
Dainty morsels do not fail to attract gentlemen as well as ladies.
I hold out hands, empty and poor like a beggar by the temple door.
I wanted from my father what I had never wanted or sought: his advice.
Imagine first the mighty blast. And then the mushroom cloud.
For two days I’ve been weeping over a nineteenth-century novel.
Buckled by time and tides, the pier fails halfway to the deeps.
“The doors are closed,” she said, and we would not be flying to Paris.
The moon it is red, and the stars are fled but all the sky is a-burning.
Too bad there is no oil between her legs that 4-year-old Muslim girl.
The child writes, Child, and is amazed at this word on the page.
We boarded a ferry eager for foaming water rushing toward our feet.
Outside the kids play stretcher. One of them was dying between my hands.
If you tear down the web it will simply know this isn’t a place to call home.
Turns out my body’s a dollar sweet potato, her screen said.
We shall still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead.
We walk in light so steep I can see each single stitch of your sweater.
“I don’t care how tired we are. I’m not not having sex on my wedding night.”
When he bent close to her, his balaclava glowed silvery in the dying sunlight.