It’s almost midnight when they knock on the window of my basement apartment and ask me to come to the back door, and I do.
“I’m telling you,” my wife said, “since you’ll find out eventually.”
I’m staring at a “Short List Of Emotions.”
“That looks like a joint,” I say. “Yup,” she says.
Twenty years ago, one of my community college students wrote an essay about a day so busy that she forgot to pick up her seven-year-old daughter at school.
I pulled it onto the dock and bent down to remove the hook, then I watched as it flipped around next to me, first briskly, then slowly, and then limply, something I had never seen before.
My grandma’s made me potato soup to get my mind off this boy who’s dumped me.
Three drunk teenagers play tag in the park.
I wanted our first date to end at midnight but he didn’t leave until 2.
My moon-drunk eyes followed the shining black line of water up the canyon, across massive cliffs, and into the endless sky.
Breathe in, breathe out. It hurts so much. Can't take it any longer, need to get away.
This is fierce, like a current that obeys only the moon and sea.
Me, my sisters, my brother, the older cousins, the younger cousins, we squeezed in wherever, even in the crevice behind the backseat, meant to be the trunk.
I showed up at the agreed-upon time with the fixings for a birthday pizza picnic party …
A moment of frozen time, preserved for two alone.
I opened my eyes and saw a paramedic kneeling beside me.
The black pleather sofa was well worn from the tired bodies of so many young people that had come before me.
At first I thought it was a burlap bag left on the road by workers; summer is the only feasible time frame in Michigan for construction.
The noise is painful.
Yes, they told me, the singer of the band is your old boyfriend.