Defuncted

There’s only one street and it has no name. Unpaved, the street is light brown dirt that hardens and cracks when the sun bakes it …

Once confined to veterans’ hospitals and institutions for the criminally insane, physician assisted suicide (“PAS”) has entered…

Sex in your dead mother’s bed is a lousy idea, even four months after her funeral. The grim setting might add a sordid, erotic appeal, but

Three Poems: Spring Training, Sonnet of the Big Bang, and Openings

Three Poems: Never Again, The Cycle, and Robert Peters

I had quite forgotten Garcia Marquez’s short story “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane” as I made my way to the Concorde lounge at JFK …

The thing about death is you don’t need to worry about the story, you can erase the middle and the beginning, stuff the blank pages under…

Amongst shattered dreams and tattered hopes, a soul torn asunder, I see, your beauty, not mine, permeates life with purpose. The sparkle…

I can only wonder at this blurred whir of evidence, clouded in the blue fan of a thousand wings. …

Astrakhan. Sunday evening. Fine, but with occasional showers. Dear Loomis, your drawing is so lovely that I pray to it daily. Mrs Sanjay…

Curt knelt in the gravel before the dying fire, eyelids heavy, head nodding, his heart resisting the sleep that was embracing him. David…

Two Tuesdays ago, Eloise Cowles succumbed to a gas leak undetected in the shoddy studio she alone rented, not the tony townhouse her…

The young boy stoops in the dirt. The house where he sleeps looms behind him. Its sides, once white with neat green trim at the windows…

The quiet forests of this place masked a raging battle for souls and hearts. When I leave here, don’t uproot me.

stars like light humor set time machine correct date wrong planet crew sights land ahead after ten days in small raft

In the old days, when people ran so fast through the woods with bows or behind plows just to catch up to their hunger …

In seventh grade I was sent to the principal’s office six times for laughing, my giggles chronic hiccups

No hiding permitted after Day of the Dead. November light spares nothing. Shadow and sun adhere to designated borders. The air cracks.

I’ve used the word “scared” so often, so thoughtlessly, in my lifetime. This time was different.

Some corners are auspicious, some confused. In Iowa I once lived at Sunnyside and Bittersweet.

see how she spins: slightly off-kilter, axis asymmetrical, her colors blurred as she dances to the music of the stars.

In the final weeks she lay propped on a stack of pillows, her hospital bed in the dining room now. They’d stopped the chemo …

Johnson enters Burrard View Park by the southwest corner, near the daycare center. Between the daycare and the tennis courts there’s a…

At the edge — literally with toes on the door’s sill, heels still in the yard’s dirt. It’s as close to perfect absence as I can get.

I don’t speak Gaelic, and I’ve never been to Venice, either, she said—between bites of her sandwich—