No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
These days, he waited before he interrupted. And he interrupted only when he was about to burst: No way his daughter was enlisting. Nor was she going to Afghanistan, or Syria, or wherever, he added, wiping his fingers on his pants. Given his Vietnam frolic, what was she thinking?
I can’t explain to you how miserable I find this place, which pretty much suits where I’m at—I’m just a worn out, middle-aged cop with nothing better to do than drink myself stupid.
The city that disappears in the fog. You can look down on it from here, where the bay meets the ocean; see the red tube running across the sky, into the vein of society, the dripping sun setting between the towers.
Nestled on either side of a busy six-lane highway, a neglected cemetery quietly ages. Separated from the road by a sagging chain link fence topped with rusting barbed wire, the majority of travelers, going well over the posted speed limit, pay the relic no mind.
Her parents are professors at Brooklyn Law. I forget their names: Shel and Sarah or Saul and Sally. We haven’t said more than five words to each other, but I’ve watched their girl, Juliet, grow from a chirpy, sunny blonde to a pale, quiet teenager. She hides behind her long, straight, dishwater hair, with just the cuff of her silver-tipped earring poking out.
The river warden stood submerged up to his waist in the mid-stream, where the braiding sinews of a syrupy undercurrent had relaxed to create a skewed ellipse of near-motionless water. After many years on the river he found that he could easily spot these dead zones within the slowly-circulating continuity that eased itself interminably between the banks.