When our baby arrives I am feeling a funny mix of elation and terror – what have we done?

My mother crooned “Poetry Man” in the car between errands and have-to-be’s as in, “We have to be home by six,” or, “You have to be at piano rehearsal at three thirty.”

I will shake your hand now. Later maybe we will have drinks. 

A woman at our airport gate is eating a box of powdered donut holes and not licking her lips. She is capable of licking her lips, I know this because only after she finishes exactly three donut holes

Sometimes we’d see a slip of moon hung in velvety sky, and we’d find ourselves crying for no good reason, or maybe every reason that we could think of. 

Bullock & Allan, Garret & Twain, Star & Paisley, Swearengen & Brooks, Tolliver & Dunn

A Portrait Series Paralleling Characters in HBO’s Deadwood with Contemporaneous Pop Country Musician

I was halfway to the Drew Barrymore/Gwen Stefani hybrid image of my dreams; a few more years, I thought, and I’ll work at the Coffee Beanery at the mall.

every movie ever has big hard cocks. ass. tits. sorry, I meant porn. sometimes when I travel I listen to the radio. the songs make me think of you and I think of the shapes your mouth makes and I

One Night We Drove Through Yellowstone

I dreamt of a white bear last night,

like the ones in the rainforests

of Alaska. Landlocked, we dreamt

of whispering to them, shaking off

one

The man I love who does not love me back sends me someone else’s tweet. The only text is a hashtag: Notre Dame. The video hasn’t loaded. A week before, the Notre Dame women’s basketball team made it

If you were to sit down and watch an American beer commercial and then a Canadian one, they wouldn't be that different. Replace the eagle with a beaver. 

We know who has her period and who is still waiting. If a girl takes her backpack to the bathroom or sits pool-side in swim class, she has her period. So do the girls who—when they ask Can I go to the bathroom? and the teacher says, No—say But I really need to go.

I only get twenty bucks that day. Trevor tells me to call him next week. He'll have some more work for me. But I never see him again. Or even hear his voice. I lose him number. Greaseback is never around. And then the phone gets cut off. I'm back to where I started.

Smart girls don’t tempt the devil. I was a bullseye, a bloody Rorschach blot, walking into the prison flaunting my muleta.

Trent, and NIN, are way cooler and better. Also Trent is fucking hot.

MINIMUS OPUS

1997
I was hiding behind a chair
Cutting off all my hair
My father asked me
If I was a retard
I replied honestly
I didn’t know
Childhood is
A population of no’s
In a field of

Open mic, meet open wound. 

the child inside of me
has become comfortable
with the heat of the months
as they melt down
like hot wax then build one
on top of the other
into a mountain
in silence

has started to

King of the Road

naked as death
begging on the highway

I calibrate the instrument
of my breastplate to lead me
back to you

I never once saw a dog chase a bone
but I never knew a dog that

Welcome to Hobart Photo Stories, a one stop shop for photos that will excite the brain, the eye and the heart.

—Tara Wray, photo editor 

"In the home that my grandparents have

I was aware, somehow, that people tended to get intense feelings about the bands they loved and that music had Mystery, capital M. But my family was not intense. We were American cheese on Wonder Bread.

I often confuse the dead horses
for trees. I say things like termites

care about the weather, or dark stars
will always find their way to empty

rooms. Anyway, the dead horses are real,        

About earlier, he had started to say —

— is that all you can think about, your duck?