To hack through the tail of a porpoise and free him from your gillnet, you’ve really got to have a strong steady hand. You've really got to try and find your faith. 

1. Mental aberrations include: feeling ‘ants’ beneath the skin.

Memories are like Asian pears. Store them cold and they will keep.

She climbed shivering out of the river. The Taigan smeared its nose on her shin. Soily fish. Down on the rug, massaging its

Angélica, who is always setting me up with the entirely wrong type of man, invited the raw foodist to lunch. In the crowded restaurant, he sat rigidly upright, munching on sesame seeds, waiting Zen-like for us to decide on a dish.

On the nights my father brings home a new howl my mother prepares a feast and adorns a whalebone corset like a rib carved from the moon. On these nights I love my family because we are together and in this way I have come to worship the wolf.

Faced with the swirling chaos of three days ago, I must hold fast to certain truths. 

I realized that my son’s vocabulary, though impressive, would not help much with anything he was likely to encounter in everyday life, now or in the future.

Is there anything more adorable than a drunk toddler? I don’t mean a slurring, stumbling, falling down, cursing toddler, though we often enough found ourselves in that state, but an evenly buzzed toddler, whose mother can offset whiskey intake with soothing butter, maintaining her toddler’s perfect, moderate drunkenness.

Another family story. I can’t get away from it. As Easter approaches, I find myself thinking about one of my aunts who, when it came to transportation, had only known the transportations of

If Conlon wasn’t busy composing music for the player piano, he spent his time mulling over cryptic scenarios that provoked his interest; for instance, how a boat made out of paper illustrated to resemble wood looks like a boat made out of wood.

She glances into a pocket mirror. She is WIFE now. She doesn’t need to go through her lines, she’s been doing this for years.

Michele Lee woos my husband through the screen and also through the decades.

Junior is not getting out of his car.

It’s January in Ohio, and he has just driven all night from Florida. This car—a 1991 Nissan 300ZX—is a beautiful ride, a rich deep cherry color, the colors

“But what if it isn’t broken? What if this is the way it’s supposed to be? Like, a new challenge that keeps things interesting. Something unexplainable that helps.”

Every time our son comes to the plate, I hold my breath.

They are the junk-baller, the relic, the trickster, the reinvention, the resurrection. A synonym for “reliever” could be “healer.”

Nobody could be quite certain where it started, but Mr. Met was the first anyone noticed.

You could tell Heather was a catcher by looking at her thighs, but she brought an infielder's mitt to the game that day.

The birds lift their blue feet in a slow and deliberate seduction. 

Gravity bends light. Gravitational attraction between masses results in a warping of space and time.

Excerpt from the novel, Squish.

The nails on my pinky toes are just nubbins, really — sort of shapeless blobs of keratin that grow in a little pit at the end of each toe.

The boy is sprawled across the woman’s bed . . . 

She wasn’t a real pretty girl, but it was Valentine’s and a Saturday night and we had booze.

There were reports of a vagrant living in a bathhouse.