People want their maniacs explained. But there is no autopsy deft enough to expose how sensually disfigured a mind can get.

The afternoon we chose the new chief of Cyclops Island, we stood in a circle at the top of the isle’s highest peak, heads drooping, as we squinted and sweated in the sun. The chief had positioned

Portrait of Toothless Girl and Dead Hare
After Claudia Cortese and Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”

Dear Christina,

Ma shot Ell in the chest on Sunday. He got a toothache right after,

My Mother Reads From Her Dream Journal

I.

We—you, me, and your sisters—are in a room the size of a broom closet and you say to me What do I do with this jellyfish? and I don’t understand

GIRL POWER

i’ve slept with someone who had a girlfriend
somewhere else i’ve slept with someone who
told me they loved their ex-girlfriend immediately
after sleeping together i’ve slept

That ability to dissociate—to look from above. You think it would make us save ourselves, seeing the planet from afar, feeling like with one hand, maybe you could fix it.  

As David Lee Roth straddled a giant inflatable microphone, Alex Van Halen banged out the staccato drum opening of “Hot For Teacher.” Soon, his brother Edward Lodewijk “Eddie” Van Halen turned his

February break

Turkish Regis Philbin traveled
to Turkey to visit his
95-year-old mother who is close to death.
So I took February off.

Close to death.  Like, close to schools
and

Boyish Pursuits

The ocean is a junkyard of sheet metal
with headlight eyes and grillwork teeth,
wave after rusted wave dragging hood
emblems and hubcaps to and from the beach
like so

Exposing your teeth is mandatory in these situations, and if you don’t show your teeth it is at least subconsciously noted, questions are being asked in the back of the other person’s mind. Where are this guy’s teeth? Is he ashamed of them?

Watching the musical Annie is something like a rite of passage for redheaded children. I’ve met so many carrot tops in my life who grew up humming the tunes of Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin,

Earlier this year, Tobias Carroll interviewed me and asked, “Your previous book, How to Predict the Weather, had a blurb from Botch/Narrows vocalist Dave Verellen. Has there been any hardcore that’s

We tell each other the names / of our dead. The cities we live in // are gnawing then burying / the cadavers of opulent dreams.

Eat It Now

Love Life

Wednesday morning, I grew a third eye, and no one had the basic human decency to look the other way. 

A few months back, I got the opportunity to (once again) indulge the teenage role-playing geek inside me when I got a short-term contract job editing game materials for Paizo, the company

At my father's funeral
I thought I was in heaven because that's where I was told he was.

Our baby is shedding roses

When you love someone who won’t love you back, that is your full time job.

David Shields: Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.

In the summer of

Liking the world is not easy, though sometimes it is / a large wave that carries you.

Gene is fluent in Klingon, comfortable even with the tricky irregular conjugations of the stative verbs

Please go read the reviews for this movie on The Onion, the pissant caboodle that now passes for Roger Ebert.com, and Ain’t It Cool News, yeah, them too, for some reason.

At first sight the line, nearly invisible but sometimes catching a ray of sun through the clinging water droplets, ran parallel to the brown water’s surface, from the tip of the pole held by the fisherman standing in the shallows out to unknown depths.

The donkey got loose at about noon. 

The weekend in Portland, Oregon, had been our first vacation without kids in almost five years, and I'd had this vision that my wife and I would feel unshackled and adventuresome again.