When I was fourteen my mother moved into an apartment across town with my principal, Mr. Lorenzo, who was rumored to keep a pistol strapped beneath his dress slacks. My younger sister, Caroline,

In jest you call for your horse, but there is no horse. It’s a bright lettuce-green morning, birds piping overhead. You are on foot, and follow the derelict tracks out of town past the Shell Station.  You step off the road and onto a furry plain of high golden weeds and yellow dross. This is strange. 

It only glows if I believe in God. Of course, the Fat Man doesn’t know that. Once an hour he comes into the barn waving his short black club, threatening to cut off my carrot supply. I sulk into

Lyle worked the night shift in a millwork factory, manning a machine nicknamed the Pincher.  Everyone hated the Pincher.  On the day shift they kept going through operators.  Before Lyle, the longest anyone else had lasted on the Pincher was two years.  At least that was how the story went.  Lyle hated the Pincher too, but he’d learned to live with it.  He’d been there nine years and would be there another nine if they let him.  By then he’d have enough saved up for a nice house, one with stairs and a workbench and actual carpeting. 

I don’t mean to fetishize your death, I mean to say we are both corpses in a way. I mean to say that we always already were animals dying into the soil, inhuman.

100k

He said that he got a letter from a used car dealership that said that he either won 100k or a grill. He said he knew it was bullshit and he would come over, but he had to leave in the

Delaney Nolan is the newest kid on the block. The one everyone whispers about, envies. Finding her story, “My Man,” in Wigleaf was an I-know-the-words-by-heart-before-you-all-recognize-the-name,

Wednesday

Once upon a time it was Wednesday, and when the husband and wife awoke, all 
of the windows in their house had been replaced with beautiful panes of stained 
glass. The dining

Two queens walk out of a bar and light a cigarette, me and Lucy Littlefist. Lucy says this. She says, “In a relationship,” she traces quotation marks in the air around the word, “one of you always loves the other more.” And she’s right. She secures her wig with another bobby pin, pulls at her sequined dress. 

“Everything I touch,” he said, twirling his fork in a plate of linguini, “turns to mold.” 

Truth is Scottie Pippen / wasn’t born. He hatched from an egg that was stuck / to another, slightly larger egg. The opposite of Mugsy Bogues / on an airplane and the oxygen mask drops down, / for his seat only. Mookie Blaylock dresses up as Mookie / Blaylock for Halloween.

There was once a time when my aunt and uncle had room enough to take us the odd weekends our parents were on vacation. Their house was smaller than ours and I felt haughty in it. The walls were dark and the air smelled musty. In the afternoons dust poured in the air like cigarette smoke in an old black and white movie. Going out into the sun was blinding. 

Hanging panties like cat skin, or Books of Dead and leaving in nighties. The jambs are so low. Lights on high are anything but warm. That pipe is what we think it might be: lost focus. He just

Cops come and take Hannah s Dad away this morning, throw him in the back of a car and yelling and screaming at him the whole time like he done left the ice cream out all day.

Banff: Running Away

I was young enough to believe that when moments felt significant they probably were. I saw sacraments everywhere

                                              so knee

Win wasn't homeless, which set him apart from the others. But he'd hit rock-bottom, jobless and sharing enough to be one among them. In the fifty-station clinic, they were strapped to centrifuge

I have been given the opportunity to discuss some of the key inspirations behind my latest book, Basal Ganglia. Works of fiction never just appear from a magical nothing. During the eighteen

I want to spank Diane Sawyer
In fact, I'd pay upwards of
fifty dollars for it, at least
if she was wearing white cotton
panties

In my fantasy
I wonder
I stop and ask,
"Is

We’d been running longer than my memory. Our path was never obstructed, a well-worn corridor. Parallel walls of thorn-thick foliage kept us contained. 

A Theory of Blue 

Telling the truth can be done in an American way, without irony or self-effacement. We begin with the image of a flag, the vastness of space. Suddenly a hole in the sky opens

I like to believe it started with her grandfather’s blessing and a bottle of spray paint—even though it might not have. 

Halfway through The Shining, Jack Nicholson accepts a glass of whiskey from a ghost. It’s by no means the most memorable scene in the movie (or the second most, or the twentieth most). But like

Ars Poetica

I want to say this
simply: I was out
near the river; the trees
were bare, and would be.
I saw no blacksnake
in the undergrowth,
but that doesn’t mean
it wasn’t there,

And in the winter I traveled by ship to a land of copper domes and cobble roads, of shops glowing beyond frosted windows, of lampposts capped with mounds of snow, where I fell in love with a girl with an abnormal face. 

Because I can tell it's going to be a crappy day at work I dress up as Virgin Mary with my blue silk dress and white head scarf and lemon drop halo that got coffee spilled on it so it's a little warped, but it will do for one day of selling shoes.

Ochlockonee

Sawtooth palms, and the hymns of
a leftover Palm Sunday
lard the air with the gentleness
of some imagined Christ:

see the hand reaching from
the coloring book, the heavy