E says the sky is fuller today and I say it isn’t. Meaning we aren’t significant so why would our surroundings be.

When it’s my turn to order coffee I look anywhere but her eyes and whisper “soy latte” like it’s a secret. When she asks my name I... more

Magnolia, Ambrosio, Valance stand still as three pillars. Amongst the ruins of the Roman Empire.

So here’s Anthony, twelve years later. He’s got this white pin on his right breast that reads MY INTERESTS ARE: ANIMALS & POSITIVITY.

You slept for a few hours after that, but I stayed awake, mostly wondering why you hadn’t yet scraped the popcorn texture off of the ceiling in your house. 

The bodies under there, in the corridor, were at an ends; by the time each person entered the airport, their desires were all set about the rooms like a seasoned, wet palette.

QUERY 5: About half the time, your APOSTROPHES and your QUOTATION MARKS don’t curl around the way they should— “ or ” , not " , and ‘ or ’ , not ' —which is how I know you are writing half of all your articles on your cellphone.

Destiny's Child third album track # 1 she plays as if I don't already know what’s up. She just wants me to remind her she's a queen so I play Coming to America, and we're okay for a few more years.

To fall asleep in this room that is like forgetting your face.

Later at night she looked by the fires of Ohio at the burn on her palm 

He wore these fuck-you neckties (one looked like a whole trout hanging down his chest) and bad jeans dyed mint green, lemon yellow, cake frosting blue.

I started to focus on feeling very satisfied with the pistachios then on a sort of discordant, non sequitur—the ironic memory of the gentle, almost weightless, excitement of holding an unopened Hershey bar. 

Fourteen tourists had signed up for “Six Days in Glorious Vienna: Open Plan,” and since Kotoko and I were the only singles in the group, it was inevitable that we ended up rooming together at the hotel.

A boy in your science class starts sitting behind you on the school bus. He whispers into your hair that he’s known about atoms for as long as he can remember.

I look down Rue Acorn. Along the red brick factory I live in. And at first all I see are parked cars. Shadows. And the slow moving Sunday traffic farther up the block. Along  Rue Saint-Rémi.

You were right, I tell myself with confidence, there are no fucking fallen dogs out here. Just a sack of rice or side of beef. Plain and simple.

I’ve been told, he said, you can make a house out of magazines. Roll them up and seal them in something and stack them up in a grid formation. There are supports, of course. Has to be a framework.

Every night since she stays in, thumbing the wheel. She burns napkins and cotton swabs. She burns whatever she can find.

Sometimes my brother would randomly run through the house saying the outsiders sat perched in the trees, they had guns aimed at every window in the house, and we’d run to the basement and whisper our last words to each other in the hiding cabinets 

When I met Magic on 188th and Valentine, he pulled a quarter from behind my ear.  Most guys didn’t try that hard. 

A few minutes before tip-off, Gorilla stretches in the locker room—he’s no longer allowed to stretch on the court, not since an... more

Sometimes she fears her new husband is her old husband. In her mind the two take up the same space and linger in the same places. 

Kneeling on cement, the lifelike nutz dangling in her face, Daniela tried to work the screwpin out of the anchor shackle, but she was unable to unjam it from the lughole, her press-ons flexing dangerously against the hitch. 

I walk every day until I stop talking to myself. 

The card reads Leo Schwezeger, MD. The only other print is a phone number and the phrase If you have to ask...

No one itches for spring like Ellis Ives itches for spring. Just watch him when the mesquite start to bud.