Stories

Her blood had been stagnant for close to the total of her years.

“We don’t feel like a couple. Haven’t felt like a couple for a very long while.”

money gotten by blood tends to stay in the blood, which has no race.

What felt like sanctity now felt like nothingness, like death.

He folds on himself like a sheet kicked off the foot of a bed.

Every day I was forced to return to the one place I did not want to be.

He smelled like the bars my mother took me to in the middle of the day.

There’s this cool magazine online. They let people read it for free.

They don’t dance but simply monitor our movements, like bodyguards.

She looks at them through eyes flattened by a confused life.

The purple-eyed women on her mom’s side began generations ago.

One makes one’s peace with words in a poem and space in a dream.

Everything is mine on loan: the leaves I’ve combed out of my hands.

It’s like having your parents in the room. Patrolling our sleep, our sex life.

Something basks and gathers in the dark parts of an open ear.

Of what use, other than to the butterfly, are a butterfly’s wings?

How did the light take forty years to work its way across that room.

All those butterflies I impaled when I was a boy—will I go to hell for that?

The scream hangs in the past, in the present, and those years between.

Before giant pandas earn heir name, they cub pinkly and mewling.

“Why don’t you say anything, people? These thugs are murdering me!”

“I’m sorry,” I wrote, “but I have to go back to the bookstore.” My only plan was to plead for my old job back. To my surprise, it worked. The law was safe; the law was my father. I decided to go to law school.

It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps the evening you died.

I reviewed the rules for myself, among them: stay in the moment.

My mother hoped moving would erase the affair with a married man.

You can call it karma if you can see that far, or joy-begets-sorrow.

The transformation of their maid from shadow to sexpot thrills Maizie.

We’ve seen a lot of smaller ranches bought up by outside money.

I used to be known for the humor of my music, the lightness of touch.

Every life is an imperfect continuation of another.