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Since starting triple drug therapy last week, R.’s barely been out of bed. Every eight hours his watch goes off and it’s time to take the pills. You have to take them with meals, but he’s lost his appetite. He swallows the pills, sits up for a few minutes, then back to bed. Tonight he…

The writer of our day has become especially repulsive recently by walking in public without his pants hind-end first and mournfully displaying to the world the place that hurts, and this place hurts him because he does not know where he can sit down peacefully. —Maxim Gorky Down the hill past the bakery you air…

In the name of July the heat banks and turns like a lift of swallows. In the name of the lion-bearing month, it swaggers; we can do no work in the face of it; we are overcome in its welter. We the city-makers, the furnace-stokers, the curious,     the experimenters; we the utmost strainers, puncturing…

I’m standing amidst the ruins of the Plaza de la Sirena with my parrot, Dr. José Venegas, who I suspect of being tapped into some collective archetypal memory bank with a bizillion other parrots— the way thimble jellyfish are with other thimble jellyfish. He knows colors and can count to ten, nine, eight . ….

No nation of alienates, we. We do our dopamine dance in the kitchen, in phone booth and office, aided by pharmacology, hindsight, and when all fails, Zen. We no longer stop twice at stop signs, frantically patting our hips for our wallets. We frog-march from gray to shrill purple, breathing in shellfish, bee balm, fresh…

In moments between preoccupations, in those pauses punctuated by the sound of malm being ground up by bricklayers, or by the scolding magpies, or by Paula praying quietly with her garnet beads— the click and suspirations—he swabs his brow and thinks about what sets apart one interval from another: how a specific point must be…

And up and down the ragged coast gulls draft on the high blue airs, coast the underside of the nimbus drifting past reach, big as a bus on a high and skinny road. Wave goodbye. It is leaving now. Waive any right to see it again. The bright stars, the prickly stars, gain on the…

I lost a tooth in a bloody fight. Was it with Murphy or his half-brother Cutler? Afterwards we searched for it among gum wrappers rolled in tight little balls— had someone waited nervously for a lover? I found two matching buttons and Murphy a Victory dime he claimed was beyond price. I hoped he’d make…