The air in the bedroom sags with mist that won’t touch anything. It hangs around the built-in bed, and stationary lamp, and my sisters and Ma. I can’t be in there. The noises are terrible, and the haze smells like evergreens. It makes me homesick.

Inside the restaurant two beams of sunlight hit Spencer’s table at seemingly impossible angles. They meet on his butter dish, which has a single olive pit in it. It seems like outside the sun could be doubled.

It’s not unheard of now for people to be replaced by look-alikes.  Troubled people, mostly.  Unhappy people.  

I fell in love with a woman who had a face like she meditated.

Somebody has replaced my chair with a child. It was a beautiful chair. A rocking chair fashioned by my father.

It makes no sense.

Though, of course, one mustn’t give credence to anything in

On August 23, 2013 I checked into an inpatient treatment center in middle-of-nowhere Ohio to get off heroin and other drugs. Besides detoxing me safely, teaching me things about drug addiction and

This one's massive. We're just going to get right into it.

Kyle, our friend, is the author of the new collection, Praying Drunk.

—Ed.

The title page says that this is a book of

My girlfriend moved out. She gave me back the lease the next day. “I’m not sorry,” she said, but she agreed to stay for afternoon coffee. We sat by the window. The coffeepot gurgled.

“I want a

ENTROPY

I saw you at the library.
You said you’d gone to mars on a ‘commercial spaceship’
or something.

I removed three honey sticks from my pocket and offered you one.
You shook your

THIRTEENZ

MyHalf-FangedMouth
SoundedOffAwkward
InAnAlcoveYesterday,
StillStufffedWithMother
TongueUncomfortable
SansBrainStem,Prettily
WarpedOverBlueBürd
Wingz.¡Ha¡ThisBodyCan't

The wife cuts off the husband’s beard & keeps it as a pet.

It was a freely made decision, a public vote, so I suppose one could argue that when I confronted my roommate and started an argument-- in between squat thrusts, jumping jacks and the occasional

a drunk salaryman in baggy gray suit
buys a meal replacement bar
from the vending machine

It was a difficult job for the man who painted night.  First off, he always stained his clothes.  An occupational hazard, and Frank supposed he could wear an apron, but when he arched his back,

Read part one of Joe's adventures through soup nazi'ing here.

—TURKEY CHILI (The Other Side of Darkness)—

Done got et.

During the taping of the infamous last episode of Seinfeld,

Just look at those soup prices when Clinton was in office.

—MULLIGATAWNY (The Pain and the Yearning)—

You could put that rooster sauce on a shoe and it would taste pretty good to

Leo and I are dicking around in his room after school when I pull this big cardboard box out of the closet.

—What is this? I ask.

—That’s my card catalogue, Leo says.

—Is this every

Mom. Dad. Where have you been? Everyone else is already here. You missed the first prelim bout. I'll catch you up: Siyar Bahadurzada won by tap out in the second due to rear-naked choke. What? No,

Sometime during the last two hours, Clark Griswold has stopped feeling cold.

He claws at the frozen ground, vaguely aware of the intensifying blizzard. Snow replaces the dirt he shovels between

At nearly two in the morning, in the room across the hall from where his wife slept, Geoff Devine was awake, gazing down at the above ground pool in the backyard. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew that within the giant wooden drum, the murky water reflected the light of the moon.