He gave her the light bulb, the glass gone pink over the years. I can drop it? she said. He nodded, and she held her hand from the window, the traffic moving stories below.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Oglala
If I were to die…. she said. She left it at that, measuring the table with her arm, ribs to fingertip. He considered that future: like tall grass never stopping waving.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Lease
The wall had 4 switches in some arrangement of off and on, a single light. Click! she said. From the dark, she laughed. Click! she said again, but there was just black, in some arrangement of silver.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Before His Old Dad Had a Chance to Shoot the Entire Pack
He made a choice, the red dog. He lifted it into the cab of the truck and drove home, nose in his lap. When he opened the screen door, it trotted inside, past the wife, kids, out the back door. It didn't bark, it hardly ate, it never slept. It lay curled in the sun, a ripening tomato.
Trip to Yalta, IN
The bus broke hiss, nose like an eraser. She climbed the stairs in those slacks in which she once painted a room. A square of white on her cuff gave him over to the parking lot, the last drive home.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Manifest
She crowded it, hawking its colors, lengths. It's awful. How bad it is is tragic. It was a tower of cups and strings, motherboard, throat of a large bird. He stood in the ozone of her disgust. He took her mouth, kissed it, held it.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
On Not To See A Bird
The noodles boil to paste, blacken, catch fire. She comes home and throws the pot into the snow, a hissing startled crow. Upstairs, she finds him asleep, eyes clenched to the plumes of acrid smoke. She slides beside him, has dreams—acres of corn-stalk, winter rag—pinioned by the wing of his arm.
Where The Woods Is Darkest
The film maker forgets his camera. He goes to the river instead, ice sliding by in blue sheets. On one is a man cooking over a pale fire. Hey, says the man, sliding by. By the time this melts, I'll be in warmer parts. The film maker sells his camera. He makes out for the desert, writing poems like sun under static.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Cartogram
The green cut to tan--textures of a grocery bag--the rivers bluer, counties wider. They opened out, out there, thoughts losing the yellow gridwork of cities, marked with the spare periods of desert towns. You are here? she wrote, across the legend, waiting 5, 10, 100 miles for an answer.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Whippoorwill
She stood in the wind at the edge of the lot, pigweed blooming and rattling cups. She angled her arms in semaphore, to spell out hello or love or cannot see. He let the afternoon close his face, red breath, wet tongue.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Ecliptic
The fog cleared out and the brushing trees stopped, the night park black and green. There you were, in the white t-shirt, passing into the shadow of a maintenance shed, the smell of dirt from the door. On your neck was a chain, cheap silver, bought down by the hole in the seawall, the man in the African shirt. For a moment you'd gone, until you passed back out from the shadow of the shed. Yes, you smiled, but a thing had changed, the line of your jaw, the white and brittle. You'd swallowed something in the passage, dark and of the earth.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Pith
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Basho
Birddog Lake
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Supermarkets
A. By accident the butcher met the cabbages, two heads on the pale linoleum floor.
B. The checker stopped her tired hand, straightened shoulders, smiled to the girl and her approaching milk.C. A mouse! said a boy. They watched as it pitched toward the broken coffee.
D. Though nearly 60, the man weighed the soup like a very good stone.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Moses
A baby lay asleep in its carrier, among weeds, the mother shaping letters and faces on the wall. He watched the sprayback drift, speckle the ailanthus red. She has the legs of a soldier, she said.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Radio Show
Friday, November 2, 2007
Synecdoche
Sunday, October 21, 2007
If It Fits In The Hand
Friday, October 12, 2007
A Wish
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Headless
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Set
Monday, October 1, 2007
The Devil
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Absorbance
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
St. Avia's Epistle
Wet pills of dirt at the grass's white radicle, the half-worm breathing consonance, eat me, find me, want me.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Nothing
No Garden
Sunday, September 9, 2007
The Idealist
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Plot
There was a skull in the garden, something small--squirrel or rat--biting up at the day. He brought the shovel down and the bone fell neatly into shards. He felt sick to destroy such beautiful death, but free. A small man drank from a sack in the alley.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
October
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Ascent
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Hardly, Not at All
Thursday, July 26, 2007
As Light Becomes St. Paul
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Easter Rabbit
Can you save me? Yes. Put your head down. I'm afraid it'll hurt. It will. No one wants it.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Matriculation
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Pendent Bird
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Seventeen Years
The tornado was pulling up corn, wobbling at the far end of the field. Can it lift the car? she asked. He looked at the traffic jam, the day suddenly, brutally dark. Can it? he said. Or may it? The funnel shifted, filling with red dirt.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Trespass
Monday, July 2, 2007
7 Reports From The Road (old one, first seen at Pindeldyboz)
Making Good Time
We needed gas money in a bad way. We pulled off at a truck stop, and she went with her boyfriend into the mercury glow. Through the windshield, I watched as he stood behind her and lifted her purple kitty T-shirt for the truckers. He was right, she did have tits like teacups
Mission de la Luz
Dinner was elbow macaroni and ground beef in a thin brown sauce. As we ate, they gave us a sermon on the
Wednesday
The bus driver came from the office and told us the mountains were closed because of the snow. An Indian flung his coffee against the wall, his eyes all wet. I went outside to see
Hitchhike
Very late in the night, the hippies let us off by the side of the road. We climbed over the guardrail and stumbled through the dunes, bags over our shoulders. I kicked away some pieces of drift and collapsed in the sand. She found a place near the waves, watched the wide eyes of the seals watch her.
The Devil’s Boots
He came off the road when he saw our campfire. Hair gathered in knots, his eyes had seen and sowed a country of misery. He claimed to collect welfare in 10 different states, wives in 4. I nudged the burning end of a log with my toe and contemplated the providence of hell.
Flat in
Along both sides of the empty road, the tow-headed wheat flayed in the wind. A white slab of marble stuck in the earth listed the victims of cholera. With her fingertips, she traced Ezekial's name. If any, she reasoned, his was the spirit to summon a man with a jack.
Crossing the Cuyahoga, a semi folded in half. In jeans and a cap, the driver somersaulted through the windshield, over the guardrail, and made for the valley below. As the travelers gathered in the cubes of broken glass, I looked over the empty air and the flowering tops of the trees. Nowhere to be found, he must have become starling and flown.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Diction
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Maude Gonne is a Bomb
Some Things Stand for Things
Monday, June 18, 2007
St. Sebastian's
His foot had ached for months, a slow stab, heartbroken pain. There's nothing wrong with it, said the doctor. The remorse of a red handkerchief stuck from his lab coat pocket. Of course, that doesn't make it unreal. He thanked the doctor and went to the park, the low bubble of children, the pale, beatific mothers.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Loss
I still don't get it, he said.
What? That I have one less shirt?
The fire was pale, shining on her arms.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Sin
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Epistemology
The Love of the Lazabout's Wife
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Lily
Should They Offend
Monday, June 4, 2007
Net
The boy hardly knew what it was, the house he was in, the crib with the green slats, the octopus playing Brahms, but he knew light, and the window opposite was full, through white gauze and the leaves of an ash tree. He was fixed with it—the backs of his eyes and thick nerve to his brain—he was new fish.
Friday, June 1, 2007
A Millionaire's Time
The Willful Child
Her doctor told her it was the bite of a brown recluse, the dime-sized wound on her palm. She believed this, knowing that if there were a god, he'd come to her as a spider. Of course, she knew there wasn't, and as the wound deepened and went purple, her heart refused to give it blood. She lay gaping on the bathroom floor, her hand the look of dead roses, her body an excitement of shudders. Help me, she told her father through the telephone, I'm sorry for everything I've done.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
65
He had a mild stroke while sitting at the table. He got up, dizzy, and wandered into the swim of dancers. They parted around him, or gently bumped his shoulder, his hip, until he reached the still middle. The band played something that wasn't music but hooves on hard grass. His wife was at the bar smoking with the men she knew and she saw him and he waved. The air was very much like hot silk as he breathed. His wife came towards him, perplexed and intense, and he knew he only had a couple seconds left. The smoke, the lights, the heat, they weren't what he wanted, but he'd never been right.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Parallax
Friday, May 25, 2007
Thrift
Her face fresh from the barber was small and fragile, a bulb of milk ready to be broken. It's irresponsible, he said. You can't throw money after love. But the room was in her eyes and all the street outside.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Light of No Understanding
He asked of her, Take this. She held it, turned it over, set it on her table.
Bone
There was a bone on the bottom of the harbor. It had no sense of the eels sliding through the mud or the fish with the cancerous eyes, but it did have a memory of a leg standing in a field. It remembered the sounds of animals and slick, pink babies. It lay against a cinder block, the marks of a knife on one end, the creature it had been murdered years ago. The bone was angry, senseless in the water, and wanted light.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Santa Maria
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Low
Twelve times they'd been here, this particular desert. On the pan, a coyote trotted by with something furry in its jaws. Eleven times they'd seen something similar, the half-dead snake in the prickly pear, the gunshot owl, the lemon-yellow scorpions with claws waving. He stroked her hair, she said something too low for him to hear. What? he said. She shook her head, no, no. She spoke rarely, less so here, the sun turning toward the mountains and falling.
Friday, May 18, 2007
4 old stories (about working)
Cape Cod
He painted houses for a living, blue, white, yellow, whatever the customer wanted. He was able to afford to send both kids to college. In state.
He drove a city bus for 10 years. One day he pulled to the curb in front of the art museum and got out. He called it, Oh Well.
Glass Ceilings
His boss wanted the 1300 page report, tomorrow. Here you go, he said. You're fucking kidding me, she answered.
Semi-retired
He created the world, people, some such thousand years ago. The upkeep was minimal. As long as they brought their own drama.