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tomorrow we'll set paper airplanes adrift over the muddy pacific, the place where it starts behind stanley park. i know the ocean wasn't really born there, i know it comes from a bigger womb, but it feels that way to me, sometimes. that edge there where water and foam smash hopelessly against sand, that feels like creation.

x The first time I met May she was crying simple, petulant tears, because she never got the flowers April promised her. I took her hand, so small it was nearly childlike, and promised that before it was all over she'd have so many blooms; azaleas and orchids and dogwood blossoms, that she wouldn't know what to do with them all. Her smile was so bright I almost felt bad making a mark on that perfect skin, but she offered her arm without hesitation and I drew a line through the first box. xi She was pretty, in a plain sort of way. There wasn't anything special in the tilt of her jaw or the curve of her spine, but there was something about th

 For the third time in a week, Joey woke up crying in the middle of the night.  It was a behavior that, like most children, he had left behind years prior, along with diapers and pacifiers and Elmo.  It was only in the recent months that it had started again, infrequently at first but worse with every passing week.  What made this night particularly notable was that, unlike the previous dozen occurrences, he could actually remember what he had been dreaming about. "I was flying," he groaned into his mother's collarbone, sniffling and rubbing at his eyes.  "I was flying over the mountains.  I had these big wings, and everything looked reall

You used to show me your skeleton, the secrets inside of you, your marrow. You run, you shut your eyes, now. You shut your eyes at the color of the flowers, the leaves, everything is orange. I am gathering acorns. I am wearing your mask.

the memory of your laugh is an oral tradition and I cannot release the dust off my lungs that you stirred from among long nights and solemn books. a philosophical question, innately unanswerable   and just as beautiful, you are the denouement, fractal and convoluted; like the Arabian nights we were once. but you moved on,   personae, boundless

Her name was Miss Mills.  She was twenty-two years old and fresh out of college, and my son was a student in her first ever kindergarten class.  He fell in love with her on the first day of school.  He never told me this, of course, but a mother always knows.  He came home that first day and he sparkled as he told me everything that had happened, how Miss Mills had read them a story from a brightly colored picture book and how he had hung on her every word. "And I want to get her an apple," he announced. "An apple?" I asked.  I was peeling grapes for his lunch the next day. "Yes," he said, "it was in the book we read today.  The kids, they

Elliot is four. He watches his grandfather breathe out cigarette smoke in his creaking armchair. The living room is small enough to be heated by the portable radiator near his grandfather's slippers. When the old man realises his grandson waits for him, he begins. "This is a ruined world, son. Diseased with hatred and war before you were born." He takes a drag on his cigarette and Elliot breathes in the coming smoke. "This world is dead, but I know there's another. We could go to it if we only knew the way." Elliot's grandfather smiles at his thoughts. "There's another place put aside for us. I'll find the door one day." The radiator splutt