He knows that every morning for several months he will forget while sleeping that he is an orphan now, and the knowledge will hit him while he puts a filter in the coffee pot or while he is shaving, meeting his own eyes in the mirror as the razor nicks his skin and the shaving cream turns pink with blood.

She will tell all this to some future husband and it will remind him of a scene from a movie. It won't bother him because it'll all seem too far removed to be a threat. That said, she will regret it.

tiny summer thoughts.

The town is already a blistered dream on the backs of my eyelids, fragments that flicker past, jerky and disjointed like an old projector film.

There's an uneasy feeling creeping up in my blood.

Spend July making wishes, on all the brightest stars and every sip of beer you pretend not to see your father drink. Wish on the times you fall asleep at sunrise and the sound of your grandmother moving down the hallway in the middle of the night.

But airports are temporary by nature, free-floating and without connection, though they connect thousands of people each day: families, lovers, business associates.

a poem about beer and math.

But right now he’s walking down a sidewalk at two in the morning, in the company of drunks and off-duty call girls, wondering if he could compare the sudden crash of Elaine’s laugh to the sound of traffic and get away with it.

This kind of blindness is a mercy.

He sits thinking of Annelore's eyelashes, pale and fine in the morning. Of his brother's hand against his face, wanting to start over. Of all his other lamentations for summer.

I had missed the feeling of sunlight.

He first sees her from a second-floor window, when she's just a smudge of white against the asphalt. Chalk, he thinks. She doesn't look any more permanent than that.

There's a murmur that thumps one pulse behind her heartbeat; when the doctor pauses and the shadow of a frown ghosts across his mouth, she thinks he's heard it.

She knows how to be alone, but not how to be alone when other people can see you, and you haven't got any defense.

It's stunning, how quickly people's use of language devolves when confronted with animals.

when you almost mistake the ocean at night for a barren field

Toby found her first.

I was afraid, for the first time, that I was going to die. Not of hunger or cold or at the hands of sinister people, like we learned about in school. I might vanish, just from sheer lostness.

pictures, boxes, and hobos.

There's an abandoned swimming pool two streets down, and we go in through the back door.

I am teaching myself honesty

Laida stayed with Sam, happy baby of the winos and the canyon bums.

They were at odds with the gold of your skin, the brown of a freckle constellation on your elbow. They didn’t match you.

You have to explain how you take ancient houses and imaginary boys and girls with sad eyes- pomegranates and bougainvillea and little kids with stars on their cheekbones- and make them magic. tribute and imitation at once.

vignettes written in August. dipped in that end of summer flavor.

twelve seasons of heat and ice cream and sprinklers in the front yard. written for the CSSSA program.

some of these things are gone, and some of them remain. written for the CSSSA program.

Was it your unfamiliarity, at the time, you being a kid with a bike and a crooked nose and the same name as my mother?

Two small blonde girls, sisters or something like it, from the way they stand so close and press their cheeks together.

feeling the sound vibrate in their teeth

Everyone gets caught eventually. [short story, nonfiction]

He can still make out the unsteady shape of her mouth.

the starkness of forever as it stretches through these plains.

The vague sweetness of summer: it felt natural. You felt natural, at the time. [it could turn into a collection, but I'm too afraid to promise you anything.]

In the middle of it I noticed all these things. Things like light, and the smell of everything. And remembering her hair, how it felt in my hands, her eyes that solemn jade. [short story, strong T, 9.14.07]

I knew that feeling, the feeling of being punch drunk on the briny salt air, that feeling of looking out toward the horizon and knowing you can never see it all. [rated K, oneshot]

I am the one who ended up with these pictures, these seized flecks of time he wanted so much.

ATTN Dr. Larch: There is little to no progress. Case suspended.

bitesized poems for midnight consumption.

with no words in their mouths

she makes friends with the clouds, who know all about color and being young.

I wanted to know if he liked the desert, that vast stretch of emptiness and forgetting.

there is Amy, who screams, and Lucy, who doesn't talk. they make up for each other. and here i am, in the middle. [a collection of related vignettes. updated may 11th.]

it really is a simple thing

and oh, delilah. what was there left for you?

Imagine a room when you try to sleep. Imagine it empty, white, no color or sound. With your thoughts gone, slumber should not be so hard.' She sounds honest. She says she is.

do you want my story or do you want my truth?

and i, i am so sorry that THIS is the way you had to say goodbye.

Anagrams, darling? she asks, flustered. Anagrams? What are they?

life isn’t as sad as people would have you believe,' you told me once: you had been peeling an orange with a knife, and it didn’t seem strange at the time.

[the motel's streetlights are dusty and yellow and invading: exposure.]

[soaked through with sand and sun and water and love]

[with crossed veins and crossed arms]