We stand against the conveyer, shins pressing into hard metal, bodies bent at the waist. Black bags tumble from the dark hole and, stiff as corpses, they move past us as if in mobile caskets. All of them in fact like caskets themselves. Black, squarish. An occasional red ribbon tied around a handle like a string of blood.
From her aunt’s garden, Alisa smelled lavender–like the perfume her mom sprayed on when she left on nights her dad didn’t come home. Standing in the driveway, she felt hot sunlight against her face as she watched her cousin Luis running towards her from the house.
coffee-stained
James Dean
T-shirt
blue jeans torn
at both knees
This morning
a conversation
I overheard.
A conversation
between a man and his love.
Sam gave me my first kiss. Andrew gave me my first real kiss. Brad gave me my first hickey. Nick wrote me a love letter. Tyler wrote me an apology letter. Paul gave me that Christopher Moore book. Keith took me to the Blind Pilot concert. Alan gave me daffodils in a glass vase. Mike gave me Scrabble. Timmy gave me the flu. Steve bought me a vacuum cleaner.
“Like the Greek hero?” I asked Ulisses after I struggled to pronounce a tenth grade student’s name during my first days teaching ninth and tenth grade English at Colegio Panamericao in Bucamaranga, Colombia.
I loved him as a baby;
soft and pink
with big blue eyes
and a laugh to melt your heart.
You’re so handsome
in all the right ways—
There are real men
Out there
Looking for a perfect women
Who wants to be treated
Like queens
I wonder when the shift happened, the sliding from archenemy to ally. I wonder which one of us waved the white flag, if there was a desertion or if a third side was formed. I flip through our childhood archives on the lookout for when we stood side by side instead of climbing over each other to be first in line.
Norm is transfixed, but he can hear a persistent voice just behind his left ear.
“Tea?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No and for God’s sake shut up.”
Wayne was short and dumpy,
slow to speak, stood in corners.
Ralph downed two paracetamols to ease the pain in his arm and leg. He looked down out of the window and could see a young man picking up rubbish from the golf course. The man’s bronzed skin merged with his bright red hair as he marched efficiently across the green.
My ex-husband, who’s just finished replacing the toilet in my son’s bathroom, struggles to his feet. “Done,” he says, and flushes the tank to prove it.
“You didn’t need to do this,” I tell him again. “I was planning to pay somebody.”
“No big deal.”
Every man is born of woman
Of mothers and grandmothers
Aunts and sisters
Nurtured in the belly of hands
no chime stars tonight; just a
gallery of dull skies: a blind
galaxy peaked by the rattling
quartet of
human drums spitting blazes
of inhibited conversations
When he was born his father cried tears of joy. When he was a baby his father played a great part in caring for him. When he was a small boy he looked up to his father and wanted to grow up just like him. When he became a teenager he wanted to leave home […]
Cats can’t read clocks, or books for that matter, but they know things. My cat Donny knows that dinner is at five o’clock, that I don’t like hairballs, and that the men will always leave before his breakfast at six. What I do is have the men stay at my apartment because it’s more important that I don’t leave Donny alone overnight than it is to show strange men where I live.
I am meeting you in two hours and ten minutes and my body’s making gestures of reluctance. It was me who encouraged us to meet, but as the meeting is reduced to a basic cause, I can feel it no longer excites me. I feel scared and I want to get it over with, but […]
The crowd roared, the band struck up the fight song, and the Farmville homecoming game ended in perfection. Dan Davis scored the winning touchdown in the final minute.
My brother fishes my toothbrush
out of the waste paper basket. He says
it is fine as he pulls a fleck of hair-
infused lint off the bristles. “I’m sorry.
Elinore and her friend Tony stayed the night at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts on the day before Halloween, 2004. It was for Tony that she had kept the reservation, which she’d made two months before, in the flush of her new romance with Jay from Boston.
We were two
that looked at each other
sideways, distracted
by one another
in our searches for beauty
and kindling words.
Catch me if you can, was always what he used to say to me when we would go the lake at Oakland State Park. Somehow I managed to start running last, maybe because I would take forever to get all my stuff from the Jeep, or sometimes it would be that I managed to trip on every other fallen branch that came across my path while running towards the lake.
Margaret has been making people laugh since she was fourteen. We talk with Margaret about her stand-up career, and her work on the hit Lifetime TV series Drop Dead Diva.
A talented dancer who has danced for artists such as Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and The Pussycat Dolls, and now making his acting debut in Step Up 3-D.
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