You’re driving through the beginning of a snowfall that will probably bring at least a foot, the road already white with salt, slippery with cold in some places. The black Chrysler PT Cruiser is a shape a car probably shouldn’t be.

Nothing, I see
But,
dandelion blush and smoky Bardot eyes of western wind. Nothing, but McDonalds and cluster flies…

News of the impending arrival of a word warrior shook the sleepy town of Surrender, New Mexico. For Deputy Sheriff Ingrid Zoe Cole (“Izzy” for short), it didn’t change her routine much, except she took a second glass of bourbon instead of her usual one at lunch.

A simple choice can make all the difference in the world, or so they say. Mary knew what some of the major choices in her life had been. She chose to go to nursing school, despite being told by everyone in her life that she wouldn’t be able to handle it, but she knew that she could. When Hiram got down on one knee, she chose to say yes, although she doubted that they were ready for marriage.

Our time is asynchronous
We have a new favorite pharmacy
A ribbon-cutting you can’t miss! It’s
illegal
to feel

Searching his reflection in the mirror, the sailor saw a subtle change in his own expression. What he saw was longing – a face of someone pursued by memories, haunted by a future he did not want. Now he could see that same expression in others. He thought at first it was enough to know he was not alone, but he realized he had to do something with the insight he had gained. He decided to leave behind his regular life…

“Every black man of genius will eventually be destroyed,” said the Nuyorican widower Irving Rivera as he puffed on a Winston cigarette in the university cafeteria soon after he learned Pedro Albizu Campos had been buried in the Old San Juan Cemetery one hot summer day in 1965.
“Such is the destiny of every ambitious man of African blood wherever and whenever the Anglo-Saxon rules. It shouldn’t surprise you, Susana.

Buddy Morris was moving the last of his stuff out of our cabin and into his old Buick, ready to head down to Denver. He was planning to help friends there open a new music venue, the Harmony Café. I wasn’t going with him.
I was hoping to get the goodbyes over with quickly, but no such luck. Buddy kept pausing his packing to give me advice: where to take the truck if it broke down again, which pile of firewood was best to use first. On and on.

Perhaps these notes will help explain the events of the past few weeks, so that not everything I have been witnessing will be lost to speculation and hearsay. Maybe I’ll be back in due time and will tear up these pages with deep embarrassment; I will cut ties with Ethan and refer him to one of my colleagues. Though, should he ever be allowed to tell his side of the story, everyone in my profession will shake their heads and use my case to warn their disciples against grotesque transgressions.

Bold charcoal lines slithered across the canvas of the huntress’s blue gaze. Her fingers dipped into the inky mixture, then ran thick, twin nocturnal serpents under her blackberry-stained bottom lip and down her chin. Her framed eyes glinted with raw focus as she worked, fully immersed in the ancient custom meant to intensify deep forest vision, connecting her to the fire that bore the dark origin of this war paint and to the fierce spirit of the hunt.

His footprints are still there to see
on the stone on the Mount of Olives
where he pushed off, like a power forward
rising to the rebound, to ascend.

Clement shivered. Rain fell heavy, filling the runnels on either side of the bridge’s supports. He surveyed his home in the dim light of the evening, reaching, feeling for the tent, his clothes and sleeping bag. His neighbors had left, fearing the predictions: the river would soon crawl up the bank and sweep everything to the bay. He looked up at the underside of a steel beam, an arm’s length from his head. The river spoke in a rush at his feet. He must leave his carved-out dirt space of a home.

time in hospitals is not linear.
the past and future lives of patients
dangle
by wires and rolling IV carts,
souls spread thin beneath bleached sheets.

I received an email saying that my work account password is about to expire, but I am not sure which work account this pertains to, since we have multiple. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I feel like I am lost in a sea of passwords.

Words are my enemy. Spoken. Written. It doesn’t matter. They’re out to get you. Birth certificates, applications, references, diplomas, licenses, interviews, gossip, whispers, family stories, newspapers articles, books, magazines, all of it, all of it, is just waiting to do you in. Words are a trap, a snare. They will catch you, crush you, cripple you. They push you around from the moment you’re born.

When in the rainless weeks of summer the mulch pile dried,
and worms we hooked for bait would burrow
deeper than our reaching fingers could grope,
we’d sweep with bare feet the hay fields for grasshoppers…

Serenity before dawn’s waking human world disrupts pristine Creation. I and my companion share psalms we read aloud, a sacred veil ensuring inner peace. With opened hearts we rise as sparks in spans of history…

The Chief Justice would not consent to die. He had felt the tremors first in his fingers, when the train had departed Niagara Falls, but dismissed the barely perceptible tingling as the motion of the locomotive over the rails. But now, the right side of his mouth began to droop, and he sought to speak but could not. He tried to lift his arm, to motion to the other gentlemen in the first-class compartment, the rocking of the train having lulled them to sleep, but it was too late.

When the old horse ‘n hay barn came down off 450 South, smoke rose for days, carried for miles. A great gray cloud come to overtake. No one thought Old Man Neeri was tethered up inside. Days later, after the coals had quit their smoldering, the authorities picked through to find the cause of the burn.

I loved my babysitter, Eileen. She ran cross-country track and strutted around bare legged in a varsity warm-up jacket. Her name was emblazoned in gold letters on the back, and there was a sneaker with wings on the sleeve.

The bearded old Mexican operating the levers of the yellow forklift sings, “Tomás, ooh-ooh-ooh.” He is singing to me even though my name is not Tomás – first or last. But I am a bit of a doubting Thomas. And a peeping Tom as a kid. But not a Tomás.

Hannah’s death was doubly final. Lizzie burned her, then took the whole urn with her when she left for Indiana—you don’t get any part of her, Lizzie told me.
And then Lizzie buried her.
Heaven and Earth are full of thy glory, the preacher said.
But I keep her toenails around my neck, in a locket strung on a silver chain.
Hosanna in the highest, the preacher said.
Holy shit.

There are those who live
between the lines of life
who once were my story
but came not to fit,
not them in mine
nor me in theirs;

“What happens after we die?” is a question that has intrigued humanity for millenniums and is perhaps the greatest enigma of all time. Of the estimated 118 billion humans that have died, zero returned with conclusive proof of an afterlife.