I was admitted through the ED to a step-down unit shortly before midnight on a rainy late July Thursday. My wife, Gwen, had driven me there because of increasing gut pain, but upon intake it was noted that I also had significantly low heart rate and blood pressure. Initial tests provided no immediate explanation for any of the conditions, but because the pain became sufficiently intense that they had to administer a low dose of morphine…

I have not ferried a living soul across the straits since Orpheus and Eurydice. I think of her and how she clung to Orpheus and wept into his chest, and he crooned softly into her hair not daring to open his eyes. Orpheus smelled of sunshine and song. Eurydice smelled narcotic like a field of hyacinths, and smoke. Orpheus calmed her with his beautiful baritone warm as a patch of sunlight in the forest.

The first time Elizabeth jumped, James was on the ground with a tarp; / they were in different worlds and the two had never met.

“No one understands me,” Elizabeth said. She was lying / on the floor of her pink-striped bedroom and was talking to the ceiling.

I was just a tiny feral kitten when I lost my mother. She went to fetch food like she did every day. My siblings and I would wait on the porch of a house whose family was always traveling. It was freezing more than usual that evening. The loud noises from the roads made us crouch in fear. Then, I heard this screeching sound followed by a door opening and slamming in the street near the house’s porch. I listened to a woman’s cry of anguish.

Mr. Nicola hated our play. I knew because I heard him talking to the assistant director. He had wanted to do Jack in the Beanstalk, with a smaller cast—no little girls, just a boy—So much easier, he said, his hands rising up to his shoulders. The board of directors insisted he do Madeline instead because they could sell books and trinkets in the gift shop. The summer children’s show had to be popular for all the kids. Jack in the Beanstalk was only for the pre-K set. With Madeline it would be like Christmas in July and balance the budget for the entire season—more than pay for the live animals he had on stage when he directed Twelfth Night.

The new priest dropped consonants from the ends of words, causing consternation and some mirth among the few who still attended mass. Juan, sitting with a group of women near the fountain, an empty plastic water jug by his feet, listened as they talked about him. They were waiting for the bread and making fun of the priest’s Argentinian accent.
“If he were serving coffee, not communion, it wouldn’t matter what he sounds like!” Laura complained. She unfolded a handkerchief and laid it on top of her gray hair against the sun.

As I step through the library door, a soft, comforting scent drifts toward me, leaving me feeling calm. Dad whispers, “Have a look around. It is truly remarkable. I’ll be in this main room if you need me.” As I look around, I quickly realize Dad was right. This library is not like any other I’ve ever seen. It is special.

Leaving the hospital, she said:
“Today, everyone looks like something I ate.”
Right now? I asked, scanning the parking lot.
“Yes. And everyone throughout my life.”
I thought so. Most of the meat
Loaf I digested resembled
My eighth-grade class.

The doctors had given us no reason to expect the baby early — so on August 2nd, 2024, I followed my normal post-dinner routine. I washed the dishes. I fed the fish. And then I sat at my desk to compose the next day’s plan…

Much of my writing, in fiction and poetry, has been deeply influenced by the imagery of painting and cinema. I have always been very much attracted to the ways in which language can create visualizations of things, people, and events.

The world seems to carry on as if there aren’t a million reasons to be shocked. But because I don’t want to go numb, I try to paint them, at least a few. For these, I paint figuratively, as I was trained, even though now, often, my desires, and my output, is abstract. Still, how can we ignore the drought in Afghanistan, the strife in Sudan, the war in Gaza, the invasion of Ukraine? Or even what goes on in our own lives?

Exactly three weeks, six days, seven hours, and forty-two minutes before his sixth birthday, Nathan Front announced to his mother that he was going to die. They had ground to a halt on the road that overlooked the coastline.

The clicking of my boots was the only thing keeping me sane. It acted as a metronome counting the steps until all of the anticipation flashed before me. The concrete had been freshly paved, and yet I felt bumps in my path. My shoulders ached and became full of anxiety as I approached the door. I held the book under my right arm; it was my dominant and lucky one.

“Lion,” Artemis chokes out. She needs an excuse. “I want to check on Quill. My porcupine friend. He’s worried about me. Give me a moment to find him.”
Up she leaps, striding through the forest’s thickness, her pace accelerating as fast as her pounding heart, refusing memory with every panting breath.

O phalanx of clouds,
formed against your own shadow,
diorama of the maxim that armies,
like lovers, come in pairs—
promulgate now in bulleted wisps,
conformist’s dark room dripping in chemical
& negative & clothes-pinned evidence

Father Maurice lives alone on a quiet street where early twentieth-century cottages sit tucked behind white picket fences. A statue of a Cambodian King sits on the living room windowsill, gazing towards us with an expression that is hard to read: it could be serenity, it could be aloofness.

Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services, many journalists have swiftly denounced his views, backing up their statements with scientific studies to combat his misinforming the public. The effect of these denouncements is that his ideas are so obviously false and dangerous.

On April 26th, 1949, Selma Stern married the wrong man, a circumstance she compulsively complained about, as though Morris Wort, an otherwise infuriately passive individual had grabbed her by the arm, dragged to City Hall, and forced a judge to unite them before her fiancé, a demigod stuck in traffic, could intervene.

The wind was from the northeast. A cold wind blowing light and steady with the predictability of winter coming on. It was late October. You knew winter was coming hard and there was no escaping it. You just had to bear it.
The man was in his early fifties and needed a shave, the stubble just showing on his cheeks. His broad face and blinking eyes were set to the wind and had a curious look of detachment.

People have commented how stoic I was about my brother’s death, how graceful all the sons were about losing the third in line, but most of them don’t realize we were born with genes for fatalism that had been switched on for generations. On both sides of my family before the emigration here, our ancestors knew little but stress, war, and hard work.

on the sunbaked
patio, a little girl,
discovers a snake
sunning itself
on a boulder
she runs into
the house
jubilantly reports
the presence…

I’m so sorry you don’t have the vision
I have. Like when Lesbia
showed me the new Cure cassette in ‘92
I was able to pick out
what would be the most popular songs
in two seconds.

We made the London West End theatre reservation last year in 2023. As soon as we knew we’d be flying to NYC in Spring 2024 and taking a transatlantic cruise to Iceland and then onto Europe, we had booked the play in London’s West End, A Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Waves of people swarm the sidewalks like the waves in the nearby ocean, and it is always hot. Shoppers, families, delivery boys, phone addicts, lost souls, tourists, girls of the night clearly in their early mornings and more. They all look the same…