You drove all night through thunderstorms, the PA turnpike slick and narrow in the passes. The tractor-trailers roaring, and sleep whistling past your ears . . . My heart was where a hundred roads converged & then moved on At one point you drove under a mountain. Later the sun unfolded over the…
The man I learn from drives us from carnival to carnival in a Chrysler hearse with a convertible top. In Futura Bold, it says Theobold’s Body Shop. He is a man in his mid-forties—trousers, all of expensive cotton; shirts of silk. He has a different pair of soft-leather boots for every day of the month….
Halfway through the song I catch her, Irma Thomas and her band slowing down the heart in a 6/8 swing. How many quarters did I once pour like honey down the jukebox’s throat to make her sing again? That was Markey’s Bar. I found some peace there but can’t drink it back. This is California…
Replace “snow” with “sparks” and see if the moral survives. Lie down and make a spark angel. Then replace “angel” with “angle” and see if morality survives. Our liberal society depends upon the difference of each flake and the capacity of the different flakes to form a drift. I looked down into my bowl of…
On her first day at the American school, Glynnis’s class dissects earthworms. At her old school, the fourth graders dissected cow eyes that came delivered in a plastic jug. But here, the worms aren’t delivered. After lunch, the class has to find their own worms in the mud outside, then rinse them off under the…
I rode the Greyhound watching the twitchy things of the North give way to the sticky, bloodshot things of the South. No ground so burnt there’s not a church where I heard the Reverend Al Green amplify, rarefy, and glorify the word so that we were in some state of sweating July. The ashy black…
I agree with the central conclusion of all pop songs: you’re gorgeous and I’m angry. You walked into the party like the last thing you’d ever do was walk onto a yacht. In the hospital, I had time to consider the ever-so-slightly corrupt taste of your freshly cleaned armpits. I was always feverish to pry…
There was a storm— Nearly seven years ago— Julia and Lucas, living in California, they didn’t live together. She lived in her space, he in his. Lucas was finishing a degree at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, biding time; they were going to move to L.A. soon and get a place together. She was…
I’m tired, spent, really, but don’t say much, lean toward the rookeries, spirulina days, effect trooperish refrains, undelinquent and pressed, not hardy but persistent still, in a fading way, feel dunked, put upon, dry-hearted often in face of grief, bear trouble poorly, issue bulletins to the Dept of the Interior requesting stays and clarifications, sent…
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