Explore
Home Lifeexpand_moreI’d have guessed the winter this way, every bitter plum already singing.
I know exactly what to do when Papa has a seizure in the middle of the night.
I told you how I’ve always been attracted to little violences.
I drag my sheets as Earth drags her tangled mess of tides.
He loves me. That’s half enough: he’s the only man around.
Imagine the world you want to live in; make the world in this image.
Elsewhere, perhaps here too, regimes stagger, a congress ends.
Exhausted, androgynous, delirious, I delight in my many parts.
His flannel sleeve dangled into the flame. Pretty soon, I was on fire too.
Maybe he was preparing for a disaster that would never happen.
What right had Flora, of all people, to pronounce on what was strange?
When he bent close to her, his balaclava glowed silvery in the dying sunlight.
“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”
Thank goodness Dad died—sounds awful but he left his condo paid for.
A plus B; a child in peril, plus love, dissolution of, equals a story.
“You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Are you all right?”
The walls pull apart like a troubled couple, finally deciding to hold.
Through the dark, we say, through the dark: but do we ever really know?
Years ago I wanted parallel lives, to see how it turns out for all of me.
This is the stupid math of loving another human being.
I am veins and breath, the entrance the world passes through.
There’s nowhere he can kiss where she hasn’t been kissed by the sun.
The mechanism and its crank pull us forever closer, you and I.
At night the voices on the patio sound like small darting birds.
He was just a bully, uncivilized, out of control, and wanting to lash out.
He was just a bully, uncivilized, out of control, and wanting to lash out.
He says to his boots, “Well, suppose we went for fish.”
She bequeathed her children a mother who dreams and smiles.
With these fingers, afraid and aware, I stroke your delicate skin.
Tobias Wolff reading two stories aloud: "Say Yes" and "Her Dog."
