Stories
His body so close I hear the cicada hum of his cells, and he slips away.
I’m afraid to say anything or nothing, I’m white & unalterably broken.
The dead cowards my parents on a tear through the goddamn fields.
By the time I looked over my shoulder, the sun had already fallen.
A final toast: “to stories: the ones that made us, and the ones between us.”
He’d be buried in the town he so desperately wanted to leave.
A story about what resists change, and what’s eternal, in six words.
All diseases were conquered. Death was an adventure for volunteers.
I never wavered, even when it was clear he was the dangerous one.
I don’t want fiction. What I want is truth. Or someone’s version of it.
We watched our father chuck her boom box out the bedroom window.
Progressive stages of revision eliminate incidence in favor of essence.
A widow is sort of a holy figure, while a divorcée is a tawdry one.
End of October, days recede quickly into night. Leaves fall in slow motion.
My son trims a curtain of lashes, immures them into a stray year.
“I think he does not care for art; I fancy he has not even read Pushkin.”
A gravely ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant.
The almanac tells them when the moon passes into ghost weather.
He sits hiked up, naked to the waist, like a stone in the bedclothes.
The dog glares back at Roger, his eyes on fire, but he doesn’t let her go.
Human language, Winston thought, was not adequate for spiritual union.
There was no sense in brushing off or any other civilized thing.
I was enraged at being alone on the outside of all that love and lust.
I'll rid the world of bad things. But first, I need to get more coffee.
The peanut seller tore sheets out of paperback books to make the cones.