Elvis is also dead. I'm taking my football collection and going home: regulation-size, large squishy vinyl, miniature corporate-logoed, beloved decomposing Nerf. They go in the smiling blue toybox with your baby picture. And rhinestones. The situation calls for rhinestones.
One of each day. Synonym for “extol” having the additional sense of standing on a barrier island and feeling one is an active part of the barrier process.
A pile of shit embedded with a crayon. A crunched and vomited frog. Heck, even a mosquito bite on the tip of the glans. No, really. It was always full of horrid potential.
Uphill from the rose garden, further from root vegetables, a house is a house is a house. And carrots are thorns that stick where they're put. Other things are less obviously pinnately compound.
A perception of heat beyond the reach of thermometers or the precise accounting of echo speed, often coupled with the misconception that bad canning, abandoned, degrades to soil.
Throwing up strawberries. Don't distract from the beauty by saying "vomit". Sandy and covered in needles, intact in our original syrup, by your side on the side of the road, we beg of you.
The baseball fan who shaves a razor ragged. He is subject to your addictions, innovative and banal. There is nothing in the razor cord but power. There is nothing in the fridge but wine.
A family which always drives away its neighbors, but knows where they live from then on and sends them heavy, empty envelopes at Christmas, postage due.
We have lunch boxes and phasers and we are not afraid to use them. Or our telescoping mechanical fingers. This being before laser pointers, we have to close ranks to put out an eye.
It speaks French. Unless you speak French, in which case it speaks Russian with a Kazak accent. When you were younger it spoke to you and with you and you pointed stuff out for it to point out, but one day it grew up and turned on you.
That time in your life when all of your friends are Franz Kafka. Franz in the driveway, elbows on the car. Franz at the sleepover, rolling dragon dice. You will come to understand that this era really stressed out your parents.
Great-grandmother punches hymns on the Magnus and serves sugared strawberries in consolation. Her organ drones midway between a storm cellar and a shack for curing meat.
Outside the house another house. Outside its fence another fence. Outside the meadow another meadow path past cow shit and mushrooms to the door leading out of the house.
A firm, paralyzing conviction that everyone knows how to get to your house, where you hid your postcard collection, who threatened to kiss you in the backyard tent, what you've tried to forget, where your sentence ends.
To tear their house apart anew night after night after night leaving just enough country home to mourn among the shanties and the strip malls and the ad hoc boat docks.
Microscopically regional superstitions such as, "Don't praise the chicken before it's fried," or "Never fish where you feed the ducks," or "An arrow to the arm brings luck."
Larger than before, our apartment seemed two apartments joined. We could’ve doubted everything, but chose only the one incident, which sounded like a psychotic episode.
You know how Scooby and the gang run away from the ghost into the haunted mine then they fall into a mine cart and zoom away but the ghost pops up in the same mine cart, zoinks? That's me.
Myths dispensed to explain the mundane: I broke my hand on someone's face; I punched a brick playing pinners; I can play piano but I cannot make a fist.
To sample for money cookies rendered chemically soft, this being less abhorrent than enlisting one's offspring in the effort. By degrees. Always by degrees.
Your most mysterious playground impresses itself upon your sense of sexuality — fallen logs, silence, and a prickling dead carpet — and not, as you'd think, the other way around.
Martinis and cigarettes in opposition, in combat, throat to throat, as if it was about anything but beauteous glassware, as if there was anything left to win.
One minute you're addressing the foundation. The next, you've embarrassed your folks at the rally with an inappropriate reference to your foe's balls. In your shiny jacket you peel away like a slug awash in beer. It's always like this. This is how you will always go.
He held her dress responsible. Holding her, he dressed responsibly. Responsibly, he held her dress. She undressed in response to his hold on her. He undressed, withholding. She dressed and held on.
Roman decadence in the form of home-canned tomato juice. It's like a mason jar would melt before we'd prove our cut crystal, Lit a Turque, tiki bar, telephone table, sheepskin rugs and chifforobes are all in good taste.
A basement shaped like your dim understanding of divorce. An attic blocks away likewise. It's darker there, and unmonitored. You can get away with anything.
There will be a half-trailer. There will be a double-wide. There will be hyphenates for everyone: half-remembered ho-hum hanky-panky; half-mast fact-finding get-togethers; hush-hush passer-by check-ins; ex-officio bel-accoyles; self-service follow-ups; far-ranging life-size in-depth mind-blowing hard-core pell-mell adjustable-pitch all-weather fare-thee-wells.
Not the dankest citizens of your best friend's crawl space. Still, there can be worse repercussions than a lifelong obsession with the greased-up lady in the fireman's hat.
I knew the thing to do was slice fillets for my friends. But when I held him in my arms and knew I had to smother him or break his neck, I couldn’t do it. I looked around for mother.
Our house lies flat, walls fallen, roof blown away. From the cracks scamper guinea pigs and poodles shaking off dirt and mold. Our station wagon’s been packed and waiting for over 20 years.
Our green hill leads to a forest. Or runs under. Or our green forest turns brown over the hill. This forest fallen with trees where the hill meets its tall green guts. Where and how should we build our house? Our green hill runs under our forest.
Simply, your point of view. Reflexive and derivative, scientific where it is mechanical, Middle Welsh where it is not Louisiana French, biblical and talmudic where it is not augmentative and unapologetically lowbrow.