All Blog Posts (17,516)

He tosses the dice and never rolls sevens, snake-eyes, trees, or boxcars until he switches to the original set and craps out. Of course he and Tony are best friends and Tony runs the games. Three hours later he takes home lots of loot and the talk at the table is, "That guy really knows how to shoot!"

But that was a long time ago. Now at the games it's only luck that takes the win. Savvy shooters are long gone.

In terms of business, Robert was the most hated of his siblings.

He wasn't like Steven, who rode the elevator to success and gained fortune and fame almost overnight, and unfortunately was plagued by other people's personal decisions that always affected the direction of his work.

Nor was he like Kyle, who took the stairs and was known well for his work ethic, but often questioned if he was working to hard and if he would ever be the same once he reached his goal,…

Here on Pluto we live a simple life; no politics, wars, race, or religion-just snow.

Things have always been the same here; The children play, making angels in the ground, and the adults build the icedomes. 

We have heard about life elsewhere, on Earth, where the inhabitants battle to control what belongs to all of them.

Their egos are as large as the world they live on and they have the audacity to say our world, our way of life, is too small.

A judgement…

Limbo, my friends, is not life, and we had to get out of this place.

There was the mission, of course; we had a devil to catch, and sure, he'd been leaving his spoor in this place from the gate--in my dreams, for Chrissake!--but Limbo and everything in it was smoke, L'amea, myself, and the devil included, and catch smoke with what, a whistle, a prayer, and a butterfly net?

Our job in this place with regard to that fucker was, don't let his tricks drive us crazy, and…

Janey goes and stays away. Awake

all night, the man of her dreams dreams

he can sleep, but he can’t.

                                                 The man can

only wait, and stay awake as long as Janey

stays away. 

                      Janey always goes wherever

Janey needs to go, wherever Janey’s

needed. 

               The man of Janey’s dreams,

sleepless, does his best to imagine others

needing Janey more…

When you look at the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge or a Bentley, you do not think of a woman.

This occurred to me as I watched two women selecting a cake size and shape, then the frosting color and design, all meticulous decisions for them, then I realized that we all have the urge to create, which I already knew, but we all want to build too and yet, while men are out conquering and building empires, we women are planning baby showers, giant…

marvin’s entire body was pressed into the floor of the deer stand, and the grate of its surface reminded him of the rolls of fencing frank kept in the yard at the back of the hardware store, next to the mulch, and how at night, when downtown had closed up, they would stand among the links and wires and feel unbounded, and sometimes marvin would slip his fingers into the spaces among the taut cables there and squeeze his hand closed to feel the sharp ridges that told him of frank’s sometimes…

The Pope Did It

I lay in a field somewhere under blue Limbo skies, and there was L'amea beside me, and looking at me with this little half-smile and an almost quizzical look in her eyes.

Then she saw the thing new in me, not calmness so much as the fierce kind of hope that comes from surviving unearthing of phantoms I'd thought would obliterate me, and her smile got wide, and she said, "So, you like to fuck boys, huh?"--and giggled.

Whatever had…

From the national debt to the dishes in the sink the drama all seems turned up high, so she retreats like a turtle into her shell, draws in her exposed parts and waits for the damnits to pass.

Her thermometer is broken, the mercury in flux even when the emotions are becalmed, and the bedroom is truly becalmed.

Touch me touch me, her skin cries out; don't touch me don't touch me contradicts her eyes.…

Consider the brutal earth spun through smooth plank walls, warring with the chinking between sod bricks. Sailors struggle with each breath, cursing the thick air and the force that takes all breath away. They stumble through the cresting fields and drive their horses into the tussle. Each ounce of water is nigh undrinkable, a wind-stirred cocktail of all the well has been and is today. Flesh stings with insult after insult as the wind batters through the best of woven cloth, and eyes reject…

I couldn’t find his legs. A cabbie had jumped the sidewalk and plowed through the rush hour crowd, mowing down pedestrians, tossing them around like autumn-red leaves. The young guy sticking halfway through the plate glass window of the restaurant was moaning. I bent down, gaped at the ragged ends of his blue jeans, and knew there was no way he’d ever walk again. “Access his vitals and load him up,” my paramedic mentor blared behind me. In the back of the ambulance, I started large-bore…

I've sat in my share of the various hells that there are in dreams and in life, but the sheer frozen evil that put those two women there at that table in still-life--Susan enshackled with all those red welts and the Harpy who melted her bones as she sat there, and the food on the plate that the Harpy set down and the look that she gave me as Susan just slumped, deadened to every last hunger...

And then they were gone--and I came to light in an old rooming house on Harvard…

"My mom is a writer, she lives in Arizona."

"Oh, I guess...that's really cool."

But it's all so much more than "mymomisawritershelivesinarizona"; that simple sentence that is dumbed down to the point of being banal cannot encompass what I would really like to tell you about her:

"My mom is one of my very best and certainly my oldest friends, you see she's a writer and she passed her gift on to me, and I treasure it and sometimes when the words aren't forthcoming I feel…

At night the toad,  same color as the dirt, sits in a puddle of yardlight, rapid of tongue, and waits for the crowd to gather.

The bull snake curls up in the lettuces in midday.

The days wear on, heating up and cooling off as only desert days can, baking and waking, broiling and toiling, ceasing and releasing.

The Arizona lupine has faded, and the water is dropping out of the creek, leaving red scum behind.

The mallards rest in the reeds, and the heron pants in…

We flew over Christmas Island after midnight, Abner above me with his muscular arms hugging my waist, his legs embracing mine like thick hairy talons. 

The warm air felt like skin against skin, the dark matte sky a rush of breathy winds beneath a vast dome of blinking stars.

When we landed on the beach in a swift run, Abner laughed out loud, caught his breath then announced over the lisps and gurgles of frothy waves, "They're alert, rooting…

We were in that now infamous meeting with him, so we knew before anyone else.  The window shattered, and I remember Zoe laughing out loud, not about Mark being shot, just about the jolt of the noise.  (Zoe always laughs when she's nervous or scared.)…

Susan led me into the house--the unclothed, tortured Madonna, the girl I'd wanted to lay down in clover to fill up the deep hole inside me.

I stared at her shackles and welts, stigmata belonging in rooms with barred windows where guards all wear scars from their knife-fighting days...

She looked back at me once as we moved through the room: her blue eyes had died, which meant that she'd bled beyond pain and now was a ghost who truly belonged in this dream.

Every room in…

…it was at the base of this very ladder that marvin first pressed his face into frank’s shirt and rubbed it back and forth so slow and hard and felt frank’s coat zipper scrape his right cheek sweetly again and again and then as he grasped solid handfuls of frank’s shirt, frank spun him around and pushed him into the tree they had been standing under, and as he did, marvin lost his balance slightly.

that was when frank kissed him, frank waited to kiss marvin until he made him lose…

Not long ago we observed the young, old, and in-between parade down Madison Avenue… heads held high with polished clothes and looks that kill. Some pranced, others strutted and a few sauntered, but the swagger was a show to watch… hair combed, hats proudly roosting, colorful and stylish apparel draped beautifully upon warm bodies and a strange phenomenon known as smoking. They were also adorned with an assortment of sparkling jewels and stylish shoes or sneakers to match as we secretly…

The dark-suited 30-something man took the chair opposite mine but canted it slightly so that he could see the woman he'd just been talking to while she speed-dated the next suitor.

I remained quiet, waiting to see whether he'd ever make eye contact with me.  His scent was 'Unpredictable' by Christian Dior, with the tang of bergamot and cedar, and something else smoky.

To amuse myself while this rude man ignored me, I dropped my voice into its lowest register and began reciting…