the opening note, a crisp major chord before the black and white keys give away beneath the flurry of my fingertips.
“Sheila,” she said, looking worried. “Are you feeling ok?”
While walking along the beachfront in Swampscott, Massachusetts, I spotted a guy coming toward me. He was singing “Under the Boardwalk” by the Drifters, half in Spanish, half in English.
The first bite I inhale, the second I gobble, the third I gulp past a hiccup. She frowns, but she's holding her breath too, swallowing the morsel stuck in her own throat.
The smoke grew like a tree, unfurling its thin curls in the unquiet night. It smelled like blueberry syrup, thick and cloying.
Charcoal sticks scuffed as he ambled, then stopped near my elbow. “You have lovely lips.” The scuffing slowed.
A total of seventeen hours of flight over three days found us half broken and drained at our doorstep. Our house looked strange.
I haven’t written a single poem in months.
Britney Spears almost killed me.
“I had a dream about you,” he said. How should I reply to that?
It was a long walk to the coast, but it would be my last chance.
I knew that I was destined to fail my daughter in some profound way, so when she turned away from my nipple, stiffening in my arms, her soft lips tightly pursed, I was not surprised.
Late Saturday afternoon, picked up my pills from the pharmacy a block away. That's all I can walk now.
Charlie asks for “sunbabies” at lunch during my first week as the nanny. I don’t know what he means. I am already failing at this job.
Tears stream down the face of the woman behind us. She repeats softly, “I don’t know why I’m crying! I’m just crying because you’re crying.”
I’m lost in numb daydreams, gazing at lush oak trees. Craving more, I squint through the leaves and branches.
I hesitated to tell the tattooed counterman at Good Eats he had a body odor problem.
The acid makes it hard to count the ravers. Hundreds? Thousands?
The cries rise to a crescendo just as the casket is lowered into a pit. A chorus breaks out in lament against a stifling air heavy with the scent of grief.
The rain had been incessant and biblical for days and weeks and nearing a month.