He places his mouth over mine and releases a slow, deep exhalation into my mouth. I don’t pull back as I breathe it in. Ali and Jason are making out. I’m high, I feel like a cloud, like my head is separated from my body and for the first time this ethereal lure removes me from my mind and allows me to surrender.
Read MoreI’ll be home shortly if this is only a kiss, a short kiss, a momentary lapse, the death of a star, not to be felt until much later.
Read MoreI think I know how she feels. In California there was an heiress who believed she’d die if her mansion ever was completed; the workmen kept adding crazy little rooms and windows and stairs to nowhere and were still working on it when she died.
Read MoreThe idea crept into my mind, and festered, that maybe Shirley wasn’t even a child at all, that our “daughter” was actually an underdeveloped twenty-something escaping the barbed poverty that forces people to prey upon the good intentions of others in order to survive.
Read MoreWhen we were a farm, I had three tall stalls. One for the old gray
mare. Remember that tune? One for the work horse. Milk cow too.
Up where it was warm? My hay loft—sharp, stickety & sweet.
“So,” Tad said, “Did you see the aliens?”
Constance and Bill looked startled. As if this was the question that made the evening strange.
Although I was grateful to Tad for raising the subject, I also resented him. I should have thought of it. I placed my clog directly atop his sneakered foot and pressed down gently.
Read MoreOne: break your own spine, vertebrae by vertebrae
until you can fit comfortably in the sole of his left shoe.
The cakes have cracked open and shrunk in their paper cups, letting out their final gasps of moisture while dying, still in the oven.
“Oh, Betty,” I say into my microphone, looking at her with mock-flirtation, “you’ve outdone yourself.” Betty’s cheeks redden beneath their dusty powder coating. The audience murmurs in adoration. My timing is spectacular.
Read MoreWe wrote a novel together. Leaps of imagination—gender, age—opened up points of view. Prompts took us into authentic dialogue, imagined conversations, compression and expansion of time, significant details, descriptions, revision, and research.
Read MoreSome of us aren’t meant to survive, even if everyone is constantly telling us how. Even if we have the blueprints for everything we’ll ever need. We just keep buying the wrong pants for our blood types.
Read MoreWalk among petrified cacti in Arizona. Drive through the disheveled planes of Texas where dryness has cracked the earth and made it buckle. Say, “I love him, but I think he has a drinking problem.” In the time it takes to cross Texas, resolve to ask this question, which isn’t a question.
Read MoreWe feared health inspectors. We feared someone with a clipboard and a badge coming in and asking to see the back rooms, the prep kitchen, the basement. At any time someone could shut us down because of the obvious rat infestation.
Read More1. Took the medicine, left the dog.
—Zachary Kennedy-Lopez
The tiger hadn’t reacted to the looming finger. Why not? the mother thought, disappointed. Just a snarl. Or swipe of a claw. Not to hurt the boy, of course, but because that’s what tigers did. The mother was pleased the beasts did not act like real beasts, but shouldn’t they at least have the instinct to protect themselves?
Read MoreI crawl in because the other boys crawl out.
Mum doesn’t remember where the remote controller is. She forgets
things mostly: how God keeps slipping from in between her thighs—
Read More1
A place where I stand and think, If the race war pops off it’s me and my half-Mexican friend against these 700 cowboys.
Read MoreI’m ready for all of us to retire elitist ideas about poetry. Poetry is for people who go to Wendy’s. Poetry is for people who work at Wendy’s. Poetry is for people who sleep in the corner of the parking lot outside of Wendy’s. Poetry can be for special occasions, yes, but only because special occasions fall on days ending in y.
Read MoreI wake before sunrise and make a torch of it
shoving the dog in the boot of the car
pissed-on rope, cracked cagoule, there is no flask
for tea, just me and my red-rush of will
Women regret, I hope, their trust.
Sit down, my children, for me. I want it. I've got to do it.
Trust is an overnight process. For 10 years I call more
people, I hurt all of them.