I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children's eyes In momentary...
In this life, there are stars and there are stunt doubles.
Before I became one of those fathers obsessed with memorizing his lines, making peace with the Big Director in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs, before all that, I was the star of my own...
The strongest boy in our high school on the edge of Detroit did not play sports—he would’ve had to cut his long blond Samson hair and put away his switchblade and stop smoking dope.
The gone-to-seed coaches who taught gym class hated him for the beauty they could...
1. Let's just save time—Yes I have seen Rain Man, The Miracle Worker, My Left Foot, or, more recently, The Theory of Everything. I wanna fuck Daniel Day Lewis too but can we not?
The book from the archive whispers with handwriting. A gold pen shines the name of every man, his every hand that closed it shut. If girls ever read, they were crossed out. The gilded slashes still burn the wounded. In the right environment, they say, every cell...
Ayumi never spoke in class, never responded to anyone who talked to her, and I tried talking to her once, no reply, but I loved her fleecy hair, her pants too short, not in fashion, ahead of her time in...
I never remember the knuckles, though his hand was bare, though their hands were bare. I remember the impressions left on this skin, the wilting and the welting. I don't remember the sound, not one smack. I remember the falls, myself falling to the floor...