You come to me in a dream, with a U-Haul , and so does that waiter from the gyro place on McMillan, but in the dream the guy is your brother and translator, and the only way I can talk to you is to talk to him first, tell him everything I want to say … Read more

the femmes are getting violent (or maybe they always have been) when you realize that you’ve fallen asleep at the wheel and awoken in a warzone flanked by three Silverados and a beige-gray, post-monsoon, steel-blue bumper, which reminds you of the blue of a police car’s strobe or the eyes of a model on the cover … Read more

(a Kerouac-ian remix) We climbed to the top of a mountain. I carried a lantern and a jazz singer as a guide. I felt the calamity of dust, heard the atomic pulse of the womb. You had that lousy feeling of not being high so we poisoned the pear tree and watched it die like … Read more

An owl in the shape of Ben Franklin. A red-tailed fox with its head in the snow.   We careen into the median as though it’s an attack against disruptions, the hoarse croak and shrill whistle of a continental drift, the lemming pierced with a talon, struck in the fatty tissues of a globally ironic … Read more

The man on the beach is another of us creatures of sleep Fed on sleep made of sleep humming half-hostile lullabies on the shores of sleep Traveling only from one night’s sleep to the next forever burying himself in sleep Perhaps intermittently enthralled by the release and realization of some dream of wakefulness But when … Read more

Like a waitress the angel waits until your mouth is full   to ask what you think of the Glory Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. He is the author of several novels, including Watershed and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as … Read more

The Devil licks its fingers clean from the breaking of hearts. Fingers wiped on the walls of a karaoke bar. The bar top is wet, but not from what you think. She looked me up and down. Her hair was black like a nest of shadows, all tangled together. She picked up my beer by … Read more

  If you yell air raid he’ll drop and give you twenty.   His wires they say are all fucked up. His eyes glazed as he reels   his way to the library most days. Some say he was in   Vietnam, others say he hasn’t come back yet. I always   see him by … Read more

  the woman who works at the laundromat is giving away her husband;   A plaid shirt one day, Striped shorts the next, So he’ll never notice, until   He wakes one morning to Only a sock, and a Letter scrawled in un- Even ink on a laundry ticket:   love is gone, as am … Read more

I swam every morning in a lagoon. My long hair never tangled as it dried. The sun combed and curled it for me back then. Leeches kept to their own side of the bog. Jasmine petals fell around me as I dove. The man sometimes came to watch me backstroke. The man never noticed I … Read more

The first snow falls on the city. An ancient Desoto with a pearl roof parks at the curb. Face it, we’re the couple marked for tragedy. You bump into me window shopping — your stiletto heel stabbing my big toe through sneakers. You envision me as a minor actor in a cartoon world, throwing your … Read more

In workshop, Tall Tony rises, bites his bottom lip, confesses, Every night, I dream of living in a house. We listen to him recall the day his dad left, how the thud of the front door rattled kitchen plates. He then raises his gaze, looks at us through smudged glasses, shuffles to his seat in … Read more

Tyrone has a walk, a don’t-fuck-with-me gait. Second day of class, he calls Wheatley an Uncle Tom. That poet just followed those aristocrats who enslaved her, adopted their social order, he says. By mid-semester, he dismisses Woolf, rolls his eyes at Plath. Those writers and their suicides, he says. He praises Hansberry, digs A Raisin … Read more

The engraver and cartographer, John Spilsbury, of London, is believed to have produced the firstjigsaw puzzle around 1760, using a marquetry saw.  I learned the world as I sat, still as a stone while the sky broke into puzzle pieces and fell on me. “There it is,” I thought, “just waiting for me to put … Read more

I have craved and coveted until my throat closed with the exhaustion of it. The same   goes for waiting. I foresaw a certain future which did not take place so I waited   until another future rose up, brought lessons cruising through the bedrooms of my days   like a Continental Town Car (circa … Read more

Remembering that morning, as father stood wavering on the beach, his toe writing about mother in the sand, while the sea and sky converged on his figure like two blades. Remember that afternoon, as he paced by the collapsing waves, and the gulls broke the blank hotel silence, circling over the field of palm stubble … Read more