We’re all thieves, whether we knock on doors or pry them open. We take what we can from our neighbor, failing to recognize that their misfortune is ours too.

Eating wore Emma out. Naomi took her off to the nursery to put her down, and I cleared off the dishes and decided I should go stand over the toilet for a while, contemplating things. I threw some water on my face, regained composure, went out and took another shot.

...we sang some songs we used to sing, then one by one, we slipped away. “See you,” was said but it was a lie.

you're sik / plz gt some help / and plz dnt / contact me anymore.

The orphan Stamus plastered backwards 3s for ees and 1s for elles upon a perpetually oranging neon sign after detonating dandelions and tearfully decapitating prairie dogs as he leadfoot frolicked during his god given recreational hours.

You ask to join the union, take up Latin, keep your job.

She was in graduate school getting a PhD; I was shopping for guns and drinking too much beer. I loved her. I hated her. I needed to get out of my car.

Something living. Moving repetitively. Not making progress. Tick, tick, tick. Something straddling the double-yellow – color distorted under a sodium vapor cone. Something stuck to the asphalt beneath the now-beige double-yellow. Maybe I am not so anxious to discover what.

it’s not too late to twist back for one / grimacing glimpse

She searched for things she seemed to have lost years before under my wrists and around my lower back.

I told the Wayward kids with me that I had quit drinking alcohol / but still I was getting drunk every night. I was biking everywhere / though my right ball was swollen.

For the past hour, our neighbors had been grilling out while soberly singing along to contemporary Christian rock n’ roll...

Inside the structures he searched for valuable items but there was nothing. Instead of springing leaks and allowing water to cascade out, the beached vessels leaked sand and windblown flowers from their hulls. They hiked, curved around a long peninsula and camped.

the wolf's eyes turn white-hot, / and sugared cherries fall out / of its open mouth.