tell me, what are we looking for, don’t die right now

At 32 she whistled for the first time and was alarmed by her talent.

For this non-reader spotlight, I talked to Sean Olumstad. Sean and I met as undergrad theatre majors at Illinois Wesleyan, but Sean made the wise move to pursuing a career in nursing.

On the day we come with Daddy down the mountain, Momma wakes us up early while Daddy's still asleep, pulls out white poster boards, markers from the closet, and together, we draw babies. Heads with black eyes, bodies curled, hands in mouths, a blue cord running from their bellies to somewhere off the page.

Here in the US, it’s often said that the best way to experience the so-called “real” America is to visit small towns. Right along Main Street, sipping low-grade Arabica bean coffee at the counter

Because sharks mate / by just passing for a moment / before separating forever and / because his dog died...

A tiny husband lay in a pool of blood beneath him.

Matthew Vollmer's newest book, Inscriptions for Headstones, is the kind of book that refreshingly resists categorization. Essays, fiction, poems. The thirty short texts, each a single sentence... 

A well-respected, dignified president living a double-life as a slayer of the undead is actually a much more appealing plotline than one would expect. In Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Lincoln

its dreams are a whetstone // it sharpens itself all night long.

Plates, large:
Stack in bottom row.  Front side should face the rinse cylinder.  Do not face plates away from the rinse cylinder.   Do not stack in top row.  If washing by hand, make sure to wash

Morgan Freeman makes me cry.

When I see them on Saturday in St. Louis, it will be the sixth time I will have seen Rush live, and I will have seen them in three different decades of my life – my 20s, 30s and 40s.

This month’s column was going to be about quitting my last job, but what’s the point. It was mostly uninteresting anyway. Everyone was happy for me and I put in my final two weeks without mess or

Although Flight opens on a full-screen shot of a nipple, it quickly digresses into one of the most intense movie scenes I’ve ever watched on screen. Pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is

At a certain point, / no sex becomes a little Branch Davidian

He was her first virgin, and he waited to do it in a bed.

Sure, sometimes it’s better not to just come right out and say it, for instance “the unicorns” represent “the writing” and that “the unicorns” are the perfect symbol of “the writing’s magical, elusive, cunning, and enchanted nature.”

Ian’s mother warned him about jumping on the mattress.

Texas gets a bad rap because it's filled with assholes, but really if you take any area the size of Texas anywhere it will be filled with assholes, because that's what people are.​

The night before you were born, your mother and I watched Knocked Up downstairs in the family room.

Rocky Horror Picture Show is probably the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever seen pass as a movie. Besides the fact that it looks like it had the budget of about twelve dollars, there is no plot,

The two of them are down on the riverbank, idling; their calico van sits arch-above. 

In the fall of Helga Vierksen’s death, I was seven years old.

1) Technically, everything remains but the stereo, circa 1998, a sound system so old it couldn't play CD's for more than an hour without overheating into unbearable skips...

Of course, I think that Mark Twain is true.   I think that Samuel Clemens is the lie.  Only a dishonest person wants you to know that a story they are telling "really happened."