He slaughters his hamburger steak with a fork and a butter knife, massacres ringlets of onions again and again thumps catsup all over

It’s never what she says always how she says it and how she stands when she says it and what she says

His wife takes him to dinner as she always does on his birthday wearing bright red lipstick, a color she detests but he likes.

Bill’s a conservative upset that Meals on Wheels and Medicaid face possible cuts in America’s budget. He yells to colleagues

We have a drop-off problem in Ame… We must decide which restroom one can use when nature beckons. So far, tumult reigns among the pe… If we declare both genders equal

The Downy is the smallest flicker but his arrival is uninvited and disturbs the hummingbirds circling in fury while he with bravado

You find old poems in the attic in a box with the Remington Rand you wrote them on in the Sixties before computers were born. They were published then in little

After the poetry reading the lights go on and a lady under a big hat rises behind dark sunglasses and asks the poet why

Three times a day a train roars through a field a farm away booming like an Angus bull looking for companionship.

Every once in awhile over the last 40 years Ralph wondered what might have happened to the guy who had moved in with the mother

There are poems everywhere but you have to find them, a teacher told my class long ago. I was a kid sitting at a desk, cowlicks sprouting from my scalp,

Some never hear of him and likely never will— pygmies in Africa, aborigines in Tasmania, the indigenous in South America.

Mae mailed Christmas cards today, fewer again this year because death has made her address book a skeleton. She has a son in Russia

There are a lot of people like me neither rich nor poor, idling in the middle who have never wante… for anything in our lives. We were reared by parents