A pimple-faced teenager is rifling through boxes of books at his neighbor’s yard sale. He looks over his reading list for the upcoming school year. His neighbor, a dangerous sounding woman wearing a winter jacket with a fake fur collar and metallic copper makeup, haggles over the price of an old toaster oven. Momentarily distracted … Continue reading Yard Sailing
For Dave There is sun. Three geese fly Close enough to the water’s Surface to be skipped stones. I take to the dock and hop into The skiff, collect the tackle box And rods from yesterday, even find Your Islanders cap that you swore The wind snatched. I look out onto the lake. The sun … Continue reading The Morning You Die
He sits by himself, at a cheap Italian place on Mulholland. Loud opera music, cheap bread, and Chianti in its little straw suit. After paying the bill, he finishes his decaf, and takes one of the Crayons from the glass jar, usually reserved for children. He never liked it here, but she did, and it’s … Continue reading Anniversary
I do not want children, yet I hide this from my Wife. She speaks of motherhood, pregnancy, asks Questions To her sister who has twin girls, shares photos With me Of her friends’ newborns. Aren’t they adorable, She asks. Look at how magical they are, she says. Yes, yes, I Answer. They are. Absolutely beautiful, … Continue reading Gestation
Dry, brown pine needles drop off the tree onto the tarmac. The police watch from a safe distance. A fox goes back and covers his tracks. Less than a week later, a museum worker discovers a Da Vinci sketch of an electric car in an old trunk in the attic. A man with a plummy … Continue reading Requiem
When you wrote the bloodhounds and bandages into the script it was a question of refuting the silence, of torching the thread on the way out of the labyrinth They will say you are a poor excuse for a wanderer, that you're still milling about the big summer when you were twelve and the one … Continue reading No More Summers
If you search people who play golf with no hands on the internet you will meet a neighbor kid from my childhood who lived in the fancy house down the street. He plays golf, the internet says, plays golf with no hands. The internet says that neighbor kid got electrocuted 35 years ago and now … Continue reading Advantages of the Internet
Let’s say stars can talk in conversations like the one we had last night about how fast life goes by us, about friends we’ve lost who have relinquished their shine in this universe and what if stars too could say things like we can’t believe Antares is gone, it seems like only twelve billion years … Continue reading My Stupid Little Life
I promised I wouldn't come back until I had no urge to doodle on the galaxy walls. In the remnants of the waiting room it was all up for grabs – the money I should have hidden away, the heart I should have released. The woman at the head of the circle made me promise to out-design my … Continue reading And This is What it Means to be Awake for It
Customers would try on baseball jerseys and eagerly turn in front of a full-length mirror to see someone else’s name stitched on their back. They’d ask for the tag to be cut, and walk out with the jersey still on, the shirt they had worn in balled in a shopping bag. Who knows where they … Continue reading Names