That night I took Tammie to the harness races. We went upstairs to the second deck and sat down. I brought her a program and she stared at it a while. (At the harness races, past perfor...

I drank for the next week. I drank night and day and wrote 25 or 30 mournful poems about lost love. It was Friday night when the phone rang. It was Mercedes. “I got married,” she said, ...

R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer Training Corps) was for the misfits. Like I said, it was either that or gym. I would have taken gym but I didn’t want people to sec the boils on my back. There...

screen like a burglar to take your… the snake had crawled the hole, and she said, tell me about yourself.

Hugo Wolf went mad while eating a… and writing his 253rd song; it was… April and the worms came out of th… humming Tannhäuser, and he spilled… with his ink, and his blood fell o…

“your poems about the girls will s… 50 years from now when the girls a… my editor phones me. dear editor: the girls appear to be gone

It was another Sunday that we got into the Model-T in search of my Uncle John. “He has no ambition,” said my father. “I don’t see how he can hold his god-damned head up and look people ...

my mother, father and I walked to the market once a week for our government relief food: cans of beans, cans of

Sara was preparing the turkey dressing and I sat in the kitchen talking to her. We were both sipping white wine. The phone rang. I went and got it. It was Debra. “I just wanted to wish ...

After dinner or lunch or whatever it was—with my crazy 12 hour night I was no longer sure what was what—I said, "Look, baby, I’m sorry, but don’t you realize that this job is driving me...

people went into vacant lots and pulled up greens to cook and the men rolled Bull Durham or smoked Wings (10 a pack) and the dogs were thin and the cats were thin and the cats learned h...

The next night Bobby and Valerie came over. They had recently moved into my apartment building and now lived across the court. Bobby had on his tight knit shirt. Everything always fitte...

I would, of course, prefer to be w… instead of with a photograph of an… to the sound of the anvil chorus a… girls kicking high, showing everyt… but I might as well be dead right…