what’s bad about all this is watching people drinking coffee and waiting. I would

I had been corresponding with a lady in San Francisco for several months. Her name was Liza Weston and she survived by giving dance lessons, including ballet, in her own studio. She was...

the droll noon where squadrons of worms creep up like stripteasers to be raped by blackbirds. I go outside

when I look back now at the abuse I took from her I feel shame that I was so innocent,

We ran up the long ramp. I was ca… At the escalator Tammie saw the f… “Please,” I said, “we only have f… “I want Dancy to have the money.” “All right.”

Later in the hospital they were dabbing at my knees with pieces of cotton that had been soaked in something. It burned. My elbows burned too. The doctor was bending over me with a nurse...

I saw a vacancy sign in the window in front of a rooming-house, had the cabby pull up. I paid him and walked up on the front porch, rang the bell. I had one black eye from the fight, an...

But the next morning it was the sa… “That’s all, Chinaski. Nothing fo… It went on for a week. I sat ther… Then Bobby Hansen, one of the old… “I don’t care. I’m not kissing hi…

my mother knocked on my rooming-ho… and came in looked in the dresser drawer: Henry you don’t have any clean stockings?

you with long hair, legs crossed h… the bar, you like a butcher knife… as the nightingale sings elsewhere… mingles with the roach’s hiss. know you as

I took it home, opened the beer, got into bed and began. It started well. It was about how Janko had lived in small rooms and starved while trying to find a job. He had trouble with the...

it sits outside my window now like and old woman going to market… it sits and watches me, it sweats nevously through wire and fog and dog—bark

murdered in the alleys of the land frost-bitten against flagpoles pawned by females educated in the dark for the dark vomiting into plugged toilets