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Youthexpand_moreYou remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.
Our fathers sit in their gear looking as mean as we knew them to be.
“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.
Truth, it seems, spills from movies and sitcoms in the wires’ wake.
My sister’s fever wasn’t gone at all, but dazzling—suspended over us.
This is a place where young girls are butchered in old-time songs.
All my life I have noted that my thinking was atavistic, totemic.
I stuff cotton in my ears, bits of bird’s nest, anything to stop all that talk.
Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.
The horror of the waste appalls me. This beauty. This habitation of dream.
Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and her husband.
For the first two months of class, Toby did barely any writing at all.
The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.
If it were me, kid, I’d swallow. You bet I would. But first I’d run like hell.
No, you may not walk there. No, you may not stand on that. He is not here.
The linebacker grins, but the lines around his eyes tighten.
The fires in the hills signify nothing more than their own wonder.
The consensus was that all the great writers drank way too much.
My father was at an awful disadvantage in a sport where cunning is a virtue.
Sometimes the phone would ring and ring, and I’d go answer. It was him.
“were all here pregaming. at my dads apt. Wher the duck are u.”
There is a baby in the square, plumped down on Papa’s thigh.
It was good they were Africans, she thought. It meant less danger.
All was hushed and stonily still, like the moon and its lights and shadows.
When I meet his gaze, he’s frowning, a hint of anger flashing in his eyes. When saw the fury in his eyes, I thought he was going to kill him.
He held a screwdriver to the fleshy underside of Peggy’s neck.
I open the gift: a small ocelot, its mouth a cave, pearl teeth waiting.
Some women have all the tit out hip out flat of the hand & tone of voice.
