“YOU IDIOT!” I scream, but only in my head. For 25 years now I haven’t been able to speak my mind, especially not to a stranger. Enrolling in Glenda’s Eagle Training course is supposed to help, but for now I’m still a grounded hatchling teetering my way through week three of the seven-week program.
Heavy Metal Love Song
Street drafts off the two-tone carpet in my underworld
Air so much wetter than the memory of it sharpness of weather
spoiling for more life
Two buses
“And there’s got to be some guidelines for this.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Lionel said. “So what are they? You just let me know and I’ll follow them. By God, I will.”
I didn’t have much for him. I sputtered some nonsense about my side of the refrigerator and if he saw Doritos in the pantry, especially the Cool Ranch kind in the blue bag, he should just assume that they were mine. But that was pretty much it.
There’s an elderly couple camped out in the parking lot of an abandoned Bennigan’s.
Full-sized, luxury RV, Weber grill, folding chairs, red Coleman cooler.
These folks have options, and yet they
On the street, the music thundered from an unseen source, day and night – but it was, oddly, only audible from the sidewalk. Once ensconced inside our house, we forgot about it, as we neglected so many external things during medical school.
These days writers are obsessed with themselves and once upon a time they were exactly the same way, obsessed with themselves. Once upon a time, there was a man who worked at the Strand and his name
When my partner finds a stone she likes, she shares its burden with me. She never seems to have a place to keep them.
You notice you’re being followed. Headlights in the rearview mirror—though they all look the same, these seem somehow familiar, like a pair of eyes you’ve seen in a dream.
A spoonful of vanilla ice cream crosses oceans of history. Hold that dollop on the back of your tongue. Consider.
Today, nothing could be whiter than vanilla ice cream. Vanilla means white. It
Asynchronous
Or,
Damn You, Tinder
In Which
A Mobile Dating App Provides Reminding that
We Are All of Us the Playthings of Chance
Waiting in line at the DMV that squats at the center of
“God is good!” my uncle Albert chanted, and his congregation agreed in full force.
YES! AMEN! YES GOD, AMEN!
“God is willing to heal you of all that hurts you, my children. All he asks for is
The more time spent at the sunglasses booth, the more willing you are to endure pain and suffering just to feel human again.
And it was at that moment—seeing that light and realizing that other people were together in the world in that very same light while he was in an alley watching himself on TV—that he finally felt something: an overwhelming, honest and simple sense of sadness that felt like a beautiful release.
At eighteen I got two stars tattooed on my ankle. I used to tell people a variety of stories: they were falling stars, they were the stars from Peter Pan, they were the North Star and its unnamed
What I've written here is, of course, something that Kurt Cobain will never know. On April 8, the discovery of his suicide was 24 years ago in history. That's almost a quarter of a century, and I
This wasn’t supposed to be an essay.
I became obsessed with the idea of bunting. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to make my own.
10,000 years from now
two men will be
digging
in the ground
and they’ll find
a frisbee
buried deep below the surface.
one man will look it over,
puzzled,
and turn to the other man
and
"I’m always looking for ways to pay more attention. I thought maybe I could be a better writer if I knew what private investigators knew, if I could see a clue for what it was. I’m still learning."
to gain followers I use my body then / I lose them with my poems
After I turned thirty-five, the age of forty circled me like a shark. My dread of it intensified with each passing year. On my thirty-eighth birthday, I braced myself. The movement in the water had
