Temple Street Night Market
One fortune teller says someone could walk around with a gun, shooting into the air and the bullets would not strike a living soul. Another says she invited a…
Fragments in a Burger Joint
It was raining when the candles finally came out smelling like dish soap. The restaurant was empty so Damien and I scribbled in our notepads. I’ve worked at so…
Elvis at NYU
An Elvis impersonator was invited to give a one-day graduate seminar at NYU. During the talk, the impersonator demonstrated such techniques as the knee drop, the one-arm windmill, and…
Spring by Botticelli, or Three Women I Can’t Stop Looking At
It’s always the three woman I can’t stop looking at—closed circle, hands entwined, pallid faces absorbed in thought, a small loop of time. As if even amidst nature’s…
Things I Am Saving to Write
for Harry and the snows of Kilimanjaro How airports are cathedrals, each line a pilgrimage. The tilt of an airplane as seen from the last row, its windows…
It’s obvious
When I’ve been crying. My face, a puffy moon. Heart, mean and wounded. My voice, a flat slick of fat on the soup top. Last night I dreamt…
get angry that there is no field
in no field, there can be no horse grazing on no wildrye or wheatgrass, no yarrow teeming with no ladybugs, no bubbling cumulonimbus in no baby-blue sky,…
Intersection
Fish have something in them called a lateral line—this is what helps their schools stay together. When they want to stay still, they face upward. Into the current. Truth…
Furthermore, There’s No Real Telling What Propelled Us Here
Uber, tornado, romantic aspiration, deep psychological insight, deep horniness, whatever it was; and whatever it was we said to the other seventh-grade boys to get them to pull…
Temptation, Expulsion
A streetlamp scorching the cloth of night, a barbed acanthus on a wrought-iron fence, he was a platter of lemons and salted wounds. He could not tend. He seeded…