muscles cut from

Michelangelo’s David

and Plato’s retreat

in a symposium

of Greek boys

and Oxford dons

This essay has a lot going

for it: clear and cogent details,

story arc convinces, prevails

over lost fragments, arguing

well enough.

loveth thy neighbor

but not as much as yourself!

christ was no commie

It was a scandal and he was guilty, and it would follow the Washington script—the leak, the investigation, the camera flashes.

“Deny everything,” Senator Rockwell’s advisors told him when the first word came in.

I think it's cute when people make a special move to inform themselves about politics. When being informed about the state of the country and the world requires an investment of their time.

She liked drinking in parking lots, that was my favorite thing about her. We’d go to the liquor store and buy a case of beer, or a fifth of whiskey, or a bottle of wine, or a box of wine, or sometimes even champagne, or other times a random assortment of those small, single-serving, airport-sized bottles of whatever they kept at the counter.

Marcy is fat and ugly but she gives good head so she rarely sleeps alone which is not to say she’s not lonely. Marcy is not, in fact, ugly, but she might as well be.

Come in close and I will teach you a lesson. You will fall down. They will swing-shoulder to arm to hand, and it will strike you on the cheek. Your neck will spin backwards like the woman’s hair in the second row. Get up. They will blink. Their eye might sparkle. They might open their mouth.

Gray freeways swoop and spiral above her, with blue sky sometimes peeking through. The roadway loops below her, with green grass and parking lots sometimes visible. She drives in arcs, down and around and up and around. Her rental car accelerates powerfully, smoothly, and smells of upholstery cleaner and stale cigarette smoke.

Wow. Thanks for having me. And sorry about the shorts. I didn’t realize the other readers would be dressed so nicely. And thank you, JoAnn, for that essay about your kid. Kids do say the darnedest things. Keep sending it out. Editors are bastards.

In the summer of 1972, after weeks of consuming only avocado fuzz and free coffee from a local Midas Muffler Shoppe, a gifted oracle named Arthur emerged from his tent to impart the following vision to his neighbor, a burgeoning young crooner with the voice of an incandescent castrati: “If you get caught between the moon and New York City, the best that you can do is fall in love.”

A substitute walked into our 6th grade math class. He was thin and old and wearing a black suit. A frayed cuff appeared from under his sleeve as he tapped out a name full of Ys and Zs on the board. In a measured voice, he read out the instructions from our teacher. “There is a work sheet,” he said. “You can complete for homework if you do not finish today.”

Bill was fired for killing too many flies in front of the customers. He folded his apron, black, with the coffee shop’s cutesy, punned name on the front, into a small square — to save face. Jimmy, the boss who was three years older than Bill and stupider, took the apron from his hand and shook it like something dirty, unfolding it. He followed Bill back inside the store, holding the black cloth and smirking.

Sex is a series of tubes. One tube going into another, that’s all it is when you get right down to it. The electrical grid, sewage system, subways, phone lines, hell, more than half the infrastructure of this thankless nation: tubes.

After living long and happy lives and doing no less than all of the interesting things we wanted to do, my husband and I had a baby. Because having long lives and doing interesting things had been profoundly exhausting, we came to the conclusion that we were too tired to make another decision ever again, so we did what many people in our situation do. We moved from our loft in San Francisco to a Progressive Suburb Bordered on One Side By A Large Metropolitan Area and on the Other by Farms That Grow Locally Sourced Produce. For brevity, I will refer to this as PSBOSBALMA, or Marin County.

Several thousand feet above, superheroes and secret agents were fighting with Norse gods aboard an invisible flying aircraft carrier, an epic battle for the fate of humanity, but for the 2,000 cruise ship passengers far below, it was just a gray thumbnail-sized smudge in the sky.

A glossy black car speeds quickly down Highway 24, southwest of Boston.  In the front passenger seat, a man dressed like Batman curses at a driver dressed like Robin.  Large pink letters painted across both sides of the car read, “Hanky’s Panky Entertainment Services” and below that, “Heros for Parties: 59 Bucks,” and then inred caps, “Boston’s Best in Balloons!” 

He's holding up a pad and pen on which he's written, “I miss you.” He's flying alongside the space shuttle, matching its seventeen thousand miles per hour as it orbits Earth like a singular, misplaced electron, his cape motionless in the void of space, a little adorable half-smile on his face.

For the Love of Ivy

(Poison Ivy Leaves a Note for Batman in the Wake of Another Apocalypse Attempt)

You can see, can’t you, the appeal of such a world – lush with growth,