February break

Turkish Regis Philbin traveled
to Turkey to visit his
95-year-old mother who is close to death.
So I took February off.

Close to death.  Like, close to schools
and

Boyish Pursuits

The ocean is a junkyard of sheet metal
with headlight eyes and grillwork teeth,
wave after rusted wave dragging hood
emblems and hubcaps to and from the beach
like so

Exposing your teeth is mandatory in these situations, and if you don’t show your teeth it is at least subconsciously noted, questions are being asked in the back of the other person’s mind. Where are this guy’s teeth? Is he ashamed of them?

Watching the musical Annie is something like a rite of passage for redheaded children. I’ve met so many carrot tops in my life who grew up humming the tunes of Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin,

Earlier this year, Tobias Carroll interviewed me and asked, “Your previous book, How to Predict the Weather, had a blurb from Botch/Narrows vocalist Dave Verellen. Has there been any hardcore that’s

We tell each other the names / of our dead. The cities we live in // are gnawing then burying / the cadavers of opulent dreams.

Eat It Now

Love Life

Wednesday morning, I grew a third eye, and no one had the basic human decency to look the other way. 

A few months back, I got the opportunity to (once again) indulge the teenage role-playing geek inside me when I got a short-term contract job editing game materials for Paizo, the company

At my father's funeral
I thought I was in heaven because that's where I was told he was.

Our baby is shedding roses

When you love someone who won’t love you back, that is your full time job.

David Shields: Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.

In the summer of

Liking the world is not easy, though sometimes it is / a large wave that carries you.

Gene is fluent in Klingon, comfortable even with the tricky irregular conjugations of the stative verbs

Please go read the reviews for this movie on The Onion, the pissant caboodle that now passes for Roger Ebert.com, and Ain’t It Cool News, yeah, them too, for some reason.

At first sight the line, nearly invisible but sometimes catching a ray of sun through the clinging water droplets, ran parallel to the brown water’s surface, from the tip of the pole held by the fisherman standing in the shallows out to unknown depths.

The donkey got loose at about noon. 

The weekend in Portland, Oregon, had been our first vacation without kids in almost five years, and I'd had this vision that my wife and I would feel unshackled and adventuresome again.

But you know, all of us prose writers in the United States have to deal with the shadow he casts and the work he left behind.

Roxana and Robert are in therapy because they argue: about the baby, about the laundry, about therapy, and about therapy, too.

One morning I wake up and there are over thirty new texts on my phone, all from him. While I was sleeping, we got into an argument, made up, and then started fighting again, all without my knowledge or participation. Right now he is breaking up with me.

let’s start with my most pressing question, one you haven’t answered IRL: WHY DID YOU TURN DOWN BRAD LISTI?

Simon Pegg would kill for a beer. Will. Has. Is. Over and over again. An hour into The World's End, halfway through a pub crawl he's been waiting twenty years to finish, he engages in a beautifully

Before, the possums’ noise had been an angry hissing, but now their voices were becoming sweet, even musical, the world of them trilling and humming into their endless, private night.

The rent-paying, however, would be largely theoretical: his savings long since spent, he would be using the money she and her husband endlessly credited him without interest