This was the dregs between July and August and the air was stilled and the bay lay flat like a shining sheet fitted tight to the coast. Hours slipped…

  Not until five years had passed did I see Lanier again. His appearance had changed—civilianized, I suppose, with a longish beard, a small fro, and a little pooch around…

  Swig Sanchez bombs hard down Main Street Hill for what may be the last time on a weekend, so hungry is he for skatepark carnage and the company of…

  The squirrels at Pasquali’s Garden Center are building an army. Andre first notices as he waters the shrubs before the store opens and their abyss-black eyes watch from behind…

  The mare nurses a baby that isn’t hers. She’s been brought down from the bluffs for this purpose: to feed an orphan, to care for it like it is…

  My father once told me on a camping trip: You don’t need the courts. You need me, he said. No moon, no stars up through the thin canopy, only…

  You are eight months pregnant, panting on a treadmill at the New York Sports Club on East 76th Street. Despite some difficulty breathing, there’s a smile on your face.…

  His ship was the pride of the Liverpool yards; her sails, taut in the favorable trades; her belly, stuffed with African rosewood fit to win the favor of the…

  She tells herself dickhead’s gotta go because she is everything she is and more without his dirt hands sweat stink licorice breath hot like fire Come ere baby you…

  In the beginning is the fish stink, a padlock pinched through a doorlatch eye. When I’m eight years old, my mother lifts the hem of her nightshirt to show…

  Sometimes I think of all the people I’ll never know. Even now someone is kneeling. Not worship, but praying for a line to follow. My life is full. Seven…

  A sting. A swell. A white light. “Easy,” Dr. Gray says, patting my arm. “Let them adjust.” Warm tears bury their bodies in the pits of my ears. White…