No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
The trainmaster nodded as Roy stepped forward. “Okay, pay attention. The yardmaster is Hank.” He glanced toward the tracks. “That’s him over there with no shirt on. He’ll tell you what to do. If you get injured, tell Hank, and he’ll tend to it. Don’t bother the railway surgeon unless you need something amputated. Got it?”
I had this recurring dream as a child in which my mother was eaten by an alligator.
(Beyond, in the metro, women dance while commuters move past, tied to their greater causes, ants for crumbs, mad for blood, seeds to leaves.)
Medusa, do the snakes snap at your fingers when you run a comb through your tresses? Or do they unravel their bodies, straightening into an Eden of hoses that could power wash the stains out of the enemies you’ve turned to stone?
Plummeting to the floor, a switchblade might resemble an Olympic diver, who enters the water as seamlessly as a pocketknife cutting into a piece of satin. There is much to be said in favor of competition, the results of which could be as arbitrary as a Powerball number.
Danny placed his hand in O’Hara’s and left it to O’Hara to shake it. What kind of handshake was that? No sense of joy, no enthusiasm for an old friend. It almost made O’Hara step back to re-evaluate the person in front of him. They had double-dated the McCormick twins, and smoked pot huddled in the nearby woods on winter nights so cold the trees made cracking sounds. Didn’t this mean anything to Danny?