I hadn’t planned on publishing a novel about the consolations of failure just as the dot-com bubble was inflating and the startup money was beginning to scrub the city stupid block by block.

The American Legion’s club 432 holds a book sale every summer in the Veteran’s Memorial Hall in Cambria.

My father requested a witness cremation.

A man rides backward in a packed subway car.

Georgie knew before he left that Lanae would be fucking Kenny by the time he got back to Virginia.

Love Letter is being painted from Forty-fifth Street to Sixty-third Street on the rooftops and walls of Market Street in West Philadelphia—fifty murals, created by Stephen Powers, who has done similar projects in Dublin and  Belfast.

May my enemy be assuaged by these waves / because they are beautiful even to his evil

Through God’s grace / the little drops came down, and the spectacle / of human science blabbered on, just waiting / for something to witness up close.

There are too many cedars here / hiding the sun hovering / over the dead

Both of them hide something, / That is why they move in such harmony.

At work one night / A truck driver had a truck / All of a sudden.

dancing in the dark / just two double-spaced antelopes / falling into the idea that art / is somewhere out there in the woods

Stranger, I’ve locked the door / to our ocean room.

They had been in the country only for a few days when the hills began pricking into the barracks (which once had been university classrooms) with sniper fire.

And so it was agreed  / the empty prison would be reopened  / for festivals

Slack at the end of the lasso’s loop / before the wrist is snapped / Shape of the wave underneath the wave / before the crescent topples over

What is needed is a recognizable molecule that carries the unstable / promise to the brain.

The frame—a grid—contrives a theater, / The specter of narrative: / A shadow play  / Alive on a curtain alive with wind.

The moment the anglers  / pulled their net ashore / it broke, and when we / called you up, the line  / was engaged.

I am moved by morning / As the egg is moved / By skillet’s heat

The boat left at eight a.m., and that wouldn’t have presented a problem, or not especially, if Damian hadn’t been in town.

You are stuck in traffic in downtown Cairo.

I am the son of the generation who got the shock of multimedia in my face after university.

Selma sat on the balcony of her father’s house reading Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera.

Hilal had two memories of his childhood he could never forget.

Ibrahim El Batout has been shot twice.

Oh dark day…What are all these entangled relationships I find myself in, which each day get more entangled than the day before…

Morning... Like any filthy morning, people feeding off of other people...

When she’d been there alone with the cat and it had bit her playfully, a shudder had run through her body.

These are the facts, my friend, and I must have faith in them.