Pittsburgh police said a detective shot at his own reflection in a mirror while chasing a drug suspect in a dimly lit house in Pittsburgh's North Side.

Tell me the dream about two kinds of decay

                        you leading me

                        through tall stalks of language,

                        the density of a memoir,

                                    each word pretending to be a smokestack

                                    or a lamp, whispering, “dead, dead,

                                    dead,” each word repeating.

                        One professes not to know its gender.

                        One becomes a makeshift laboratory.

                        One is a picture of water running out.

                        Every other one is in enormous pain

because the army is filled

with little boys.

            At the curtain: I am ready to accept the mouth of

                        another customer, diddling his shape

                        that grows impossibly against a model universe.

            At the curtain: I am ready for a complex series of dots

                        and dashes, pleasing back and forth

                        the bare sound of naked

                        feet on canvas.

For the censure of the last two scenes

                        I cross half the distance of the remaining stage

                                    and without turning your head from

                                    the audience

you speak.

                         

"Paper Mill Playhouse is excited to provide patrons with a brand new, interactive website. The imaginative design pays homage to the innate creativity of our theatre," says Mark S. Hoebee, Producing Artistic Director of Paper Mill Playhouse. "The focus of the website is to help visitors get what they need more efficiently."

Tell me about the dream where we wake in between notebook

pages you and I, the two kinds of decay,

synchronous with a deserving narrative.

            It begins with you kneeling over the creek behind my childhood

home flicking water with your middle finger

            reassuring me that it was alright to go back,

            and to say things reminiscent of regret

like,

            “His spirit told me to keep it a secret,” and that “Her body

told a short

                        short

story.”

            In the backyard by the unhinged screen door you kissed me

                        and squeezed my fatty triceps

                        and said, “I think I’ll stay the night, for you.”

            I said, “I thought that would be alright,” and that

                        I’d make up the sofa.

            I had been living alone so long that

            later I pissed with the door open

                        and you walked through the hallway to the kitchen

                        nearly spattering your original Yoplait

                        all over the picture of my mother standing

                                                              behind my father resting

                                    her hands nervously sweet

                                    over his cocked shoulders.

           

“You bastard!” she screamed. “You’re trying to mar my beauty!”

My Catholic grandmother once told me that experience was a   

                            punishment from God.  She believed a lot of things,

some crazy, some not so crazy.  We argued often and for many reasons,

two being because she believed

                                               chicken was not meat, and that "colored" was

           an appropriate term to describe people.  However, a St. Anthony

                                  pendant

                                                still hangs from my rear

               view because she believes I need him. 

She would often tell me, over flat lemon lime soda and store bought

                                         shortbread cookies,

                         that God was angry with us,

that he'd been so from the very beginnng.  By merely living we were

                                         putrefying our innocence.  She said these

experiences

                                               recoiled back to the very moment of birth, and that every breath

                                thereafter was direct

                                     negation of incorruptibility and virtue.  From each

idyllic kiss seeks

                                                derision and virulence. 

Little murders, she called them. 

                          For every experience

we murder innocence, and once

                                                          depleted comes specious light,

                         knowing no boundaries

                                         or repose.

My boyfriend "Chucky" and I have been together for a while and things are starting to get serious. I'm 15 and he's almost 18. I'm falling in love with him, which has never happened with any other guy. I really think he's "The One." Chucky proposed, but it isn't official yet. I still have no ring, but I'm thinking of accepting. Now he says he wants a baby.

The other night I rode a cucumber across the kitchen floor crashing against her thighs as she beheaded red peppers. 

She laughed and slapped my hands as it passed between them.

Gradually she clenched the cucumber and then turned slowly until she faced me holding the paring knife in a striking pose.  “I could do it you know?” 

With the cucumber between her legs she lit a cigarette still holding the paring knife and tapped ash into the sink, and simply whispered, “I would.”

Carving off red pepper heads over the trashcan, she began talking about a book she read in college.

It had something to do with a white horse whipped with tiger lilies, a white waterfall dragged over screams of small children, and fireflies rallying against the night.

I told her I didn’t care and then reached for wine glasses in the cupboard above her head.

She flattened the paring knife against my chest and slid the cucumber more comfortably between her thighs. 

After dragging her cigarette she placed it between my lips and said, “What would you do if I suddenly sprouted wings and flew out of here?

           What would you remember first?”

"It did pass through my mind that someday, is he going to say, 'Mom, why'd you let me do this?' But we talked about it for a long time, and it's something he never changed his mind on," she said.

The other night Andy talks to me about reflection. 

He says that sometimes in writing you have to perceive the image’s reflection in order to completely digest the exchange. 

It makes me wonder if you’ve ever really been in love with me, when you hold me desperately from behind, grappling for entrance.

After kissing my shoulders you put your head on my chest running your finger in circles around my nipple.  

You feel around for my zipper and when you cannot find it, you begin nervously tapping your fingers against my lower back, whispering passwords into my ears. 

You have a remarkable appetite for disdain.

My mouth parts as your breath heats every sound. 

When it opens your hands carefully glide up my back and over my shoulders, pausing momentarily under my jaw before abruptly reaching in and snapping it back. 

You reach your right arm inside rifling it underneath my shoulder bone, helplessly toward my fingertips. 

When you cannot reach them, you turn, confronting true cosmos as your left hand reaches in grazing my molars. 

With one enormous leap you curl your feet and legs inside and I swallow you down. 

Your feet burst through my hamstrings and you become four-legged. 

Two flabby arms hang lifelessly at my wrists. 

When you finally sit back onto my calves we are sharing a calm and constant river. 

My head drops backward and you follow my lead, never quite wrapping my mouth completely over yours. 

Curling inside me you fall asleep under the wet mess of my remaining flesh. 

I have no reason to believe you’ve ever been more comfortable.

"One wonders what Lincoln thought when reports floated back to Springfield of the harrowing Donner Party debacle," Holst wrote. "We can imagine him reading the newspaper's lurid accounts of deep snow, exhaustion, exposure and starvation, and shaking his head to think that the man with whom he'd gone to war and gone to trial would one day come to such hardship," she added.

We’re watching Texas roll over the Devil Rays and Greg tells me that my writing is less about love and beauty these days, and frequently borders on misogyny. 

Last time I read your blog, he tells me, I hoped you didn’t really feel this way.  Even your last book, he says, was horrifyingly brutal. 

It makes me wonder if you’ve ever really loved a woman.

I imagine love, I tell him, is never without cuts and bruises, and there is no such thing as love without consequence. 

In my stories, when I love a woman I want to know her entirely, to be completely inside her.  

I want to hold her desperately from behind, as she bends her neck invitingly, inhaling deeply as I reach for her zipper.

After fingering her atlas I unzip her spine and her head falls forward in agreement. 

Crawling inside just above her tailbone, I stuff my feet one at a time into her thighs, calves, feet, and then toes, careful so as not to break a nail. 

I slip my groin into hers and pull her belly to mine, holding her ass firmly with my free hand before pressing it against my own. 

When I pull her arms over mine I realize how much smoother they are than my own and when I touch them with her fingers they remind me of dried candle wax and falling asleep in buttercups. 

There is a tattoo between her forefinger and thumb that says *L*O*V*E*. 

Using her hands I tuck her neck up against mine and feel the remarkable weight of her chest drawing me forward.

Her shoulders stretch tightly over the bone.

Finally, I take a deep breath and slide her head over mine, hearing her sigh for the first time, our eyes staring inside out. 

When our mouths touch we eat my lips right off her face and our tongues wrestle indiscriminately from roof to floor.

I want to know what she’s thinking when we look at our self in the mirror, examining what’s changed and what remains.

But I know for certain that we love each other by the way we lean into the mirror and gently kiss the glass, and mouth just the right words, before closing our bedroom door.

"That video was so much fun," Pepa says. "People wanna know what it means. 'Shoop' is whatever you want it to mean. You just shooping around. Just shoop!"

Let’s talk about mix tapes. 

Salt n’ Peppa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” gives me an erection every time I hear it.  It comes on the radio, on MTV, and at school dances.  I can’t believe they play it at school dances.  But they do, and then we dance, and they we actually talk about sex.  Christ it is so exciting to talk about sex.  There are so many mysteries under frill and lace, the new protrusion of breasts and erections, and the perplexing, exhilarated desire to touch.  

My best friend lives across the street and is close family friends with three young girls from North Buffalo.  Their mothers are best friends so dinner and drinks are common.  Every time they come over he invites me and we listen to Blacks’ Magic over and over again.

The oldest one, the one with only one hand, always insists on playing truth or dare, inevitably leading to heated conversations. 

What’s the farthest you’ve ever gone?  I dare you to go into the closet together.  I dare you to show me yours. 

The youngest girl always leaves, angry at the one with one hand because she goes too far. 

Inevitably my father calls me home as I close in on the one with one hand.  I beg to stay and he usually refuses. 

When it comes to sex at a young age, you never know what is going to happen next.  The only certainty is that your worst tube sock is going to by crusted shut by morning. 

"All of those killed would not have been hoodlums or murderers--many would have been victims of mob psychology or innocent bystanders. If a shoot-to-kill policy was right, my judgment was wrong."

Found an old phone number and felt compelled to dial it.  Her last name was Jackson and she looked something like Michael Jackson circa the Black or White video.  I always wondered why, for a video about racial and gender equality someone decided it would be exciting to have him leap atop a brand new Lincoln and to smash its windows with a tire iron.  Or did he break them by screaming?  I’m not sure.  Either way, I think a tiger entered just after that from around a dark corner along a bright red brick wall.  At the end of the video was a montage of people shirtless from the shoulders up, each shown individually like a mug shot, before metamorphosis into the next person.  It went from a black man to a white woman to an Asian man to a black woman to a white man and so on in that fashion. 

Judge Carrie Ann Inaba said she felt a connection with the beyond in the performance and Judge Bruno Tonioli invoked Grey's name from the movie when he proclaimed, "Baby is back where she belongs."

There have been a few Amy’s in my life. 

One, early on, I rub up against during middle school dances, especially when Hungry Eyes comes over the loudspeakers, and all you can think about is Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey abiding desperately by dance space.

Another only months after my divorce, buys me sports coats and breath mints and lets me finger-bang her ass on the first date, after I half-ass a pasta primavera with cashews and fresh basil, and an eight dollar bottle of Merlot.  We watch the original Dawn of the Dead repeatedly rewinding the part where a keyed up cop kicks open an apartment door blasting clear the head of a “dirty spic,” because we laugh so hard we can’t breathe. 

But the one I remember best I meet through Shay.  I hate Shay for many reasons, but mostly because she owns a parakeet but doesn’t own a birdcage.  Amy has recently ended a long term abusive relationship and is deeply in need of compassion. 

Only months earlier, her mother left her father for another woman who promptly hit on her while she was showering. 

She had large bruises on her body and a large gap between her two front teeth large enough that I always wondered how many toothpicks I could stack between them.

After we fuck I tell her I don’t want a serious relationship, but that I really enjoy her and we should do it again. 

One day she wears overalls to my apartment and I tell her I cannot see myself introducing her to my mother. 

For my birthday a group of us go to Anacone’s and Amy is playing pool while I sit at the bar drinking the “working man’s special.” 

I jealously watch every guy in the bar walk over as she bends over to align her shot, her skirt hiking her thighs.  When she shoots she squeals as if she’s been caught doing something inappropriate. 

That night she gives me head in the alley behind the bar. 

I never call her again.

Judge Carrie Ann Inaba said she felt a connection with the beyond in the performance and Judge Bruno Tonioli invoked Grey's name from the movie when he proclaimed, "Baby is back where she belongs."

There have been a few Amy’s in my life. 

One, early on, I rub up against during middle school dances, especially when Hungry Eyes came over the loudspeakers, and all you can think about is Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey abiding desperately by dance space.

Another only months after my divorce, buys me sports coats and breath mints and lets me finger-bang her ass on the first date, after I half-ass a pasta primavera with cashews and fresh basil, and an eight dollar bottle of Merlot.  We watch the original Dawn of the Dead repeatedly rewinding the part where a keyed up cop kicks open an apartment door blasting clear the head of a “dirty spic,” because we laugh so hard we can’t breathe. 

But the one I remember best I meet through Shay.  I hate Shay for many reasons, but mostly because she owns a parakeet but doesn’t own a birdcage.  Amy has recently ended a long term abusive relationship and is deeply in need of compassion. 

Only months earlier, her mother left her father for another woman who promptly hit on her while she was showering. 

She had large bruises on her body and a large gap between her two front teeth large enough that I always wondered how many toothpicks I could stack between them.

After we fuck I tell her I don’t want a serious relationship, but that I really enjoy her and we should do it again. 

One day she wears overalls to my apartment and I tell her I cannot see myself introducing her to my mother. 

For my birthday a group of us go to Anacone’s and Amy is playing pool while I sit at the bar drinking the “working man’s special.” 

I jealously watch every guy in the bar walk over as she bends over to align her shot, her skirt hiking her thighs.  When she shoots she squeals as if she’s been caught doing something inappropriate. 

That night she gives me head in the alley behind the bar. 

I never call her again.

The official figures underestimate the true number of male victims, Mays said. "Culturally it's difficult for men to bring these incidents to the attention of the authorities. Men are reluctant to say that they've been abused by women, because it's seen as unmanly and weak."

The last time Rebecca and I have sex I seduce her while we’re sitting on the couch dividing our assets and liabilities. 

Maverick is on the kitchen floor licking the tiles. 

Garbage bags full of clothing and personal items are piled on the hardwood floor mingling with tufts of dog hair and dust.

It’s just after noon and I pour myself a gin and tonic and turn on TCM.  Sniper, starring Tom Berringer and Billy Zane, is playing for the twelfth consecutive day. 

Rebecca is holding our credit cards and asks me if she can have the cork coasters and the bamboo salad bowls.

She’s upset and begins crying.  I’m more horny than upset, and after I grope her thighs and then her breasts, and push back her hair behind her ears, she drops our credit cards on the floor and begins touching me. 

We kiss on the couch.  Then we kiss on the bed where I watch her cry as we take off each other’s clothes.  She cries some more and then I’m inside her.  She’s no longer crying but she’s wet all over.

Before long she roles me over and grinds her clit into my pelvic bone for only second before coming and then grows impatient for me to finish. 

When I finish she slides off me and a glob of semen somehow drops into my navel. 

“We were always good at that,” she says, cupping her groin and plodding to the bathroom.

Normally I follow her in to clean myself and to watch her spray a mix of semen and piss into the bowl and we high five like some kind of fucking team before she squirts bits of shit at the arrival of an abrupt fart. 

But this time I wait outside, and we don’t high five while she’s leaking into the porcelain. 

Instead I stand there admiring my naked body in the mirror, listening to Maverick lick the same spot over and over, feeling a warm summer breeze wisp through the kitchen window, and her menstrual blood drying on my crotch, as I wash the dishes.

The story takes a look at her long history of bedwetting that she couldn't shake until high school. "They're stories that I've felt like I would probably be interested in reading should I know how to read. And, you know, sometimes it gets a little tender. It's kind of like when Fonzie (on 'Happy Days') first cried, I guess."

Misread bed sheets as bird shit and felt compelled to read the poem aloud.  The poem was called Wrap Yourself in Bed Sheets.  There was something about a lunatic and a sleepless night.  There were puddles, wind tunnels, and apparently much to live for.  It didn’t read very well and the line breaks kept missing a note.  Being wrapped in bird shit would have made a much lovelier sound.

For six months, Mary Nixon and 10 other orphans were relentlessly belittled for every little imperfection in their speech to test the theory that children become stutterers because of psychological pressure. ''I don't think anybody today likes the idea of seeing orphans, children, used that way,'' said Jane Fraser, president of the Stuttering Foundation in Memphis. ''But it's really important to keep things in historical perspective.''

It was a class with Renee Gladman, week one, 7/4/2005, where we discussed abstraction as an important element to explore place and time.  It was this class in particular that stuttering was first introduced to me as empowerment over impediment.  After several days of stuttering through going around the room and reading, just like in 8^th grade when I would try to time my bathroom breaks for when it was my turn to read just so they would pass over me, only to return and have Dr. Farkis, a.k.a. Hitler, make me read anyway.  All the girls I liked were in that class.  Michelle, a thin, considerate brunette who gained nearly a hundred pounds after high school, Audra who had two kids and is married to an FBI agent, and Leslie, who I saw once at the mall years after high school while I was high on LSD and even then didn’t have the courage to say hello.  Long story short, Kilroy told me he loved when I spoke.  Said it sounded like music, and that no one he’d ever met sounded like that.  I miss that guy. 

Shane was sitting in the bleachers when an errant soccer ball smashed him in the choppers, breaking his new bridgework. "The force of those balls going across the gymnasium, especially thrown by middle school students, could be quite strong."

I am among the quickest and the weakest

And I can say without hesitation

That nothing prepares you

For an algebra exam

Quite like a half dozen

Pimply, half-erect

Sweating boys

In yellow short

Shorts lunging

Red rubber balls

But this time one hits

Sanders’ groin

Bending him at knees

Before dropping him.

After losing, Shane Deluca

Beats him to tears with his tennis shoe

While everyone watches

It rise over the lockers and
Listens for the sound of rubber
Meeting flesh

Before breaking into
hysterics, impatiently
waiting for the bell. 

Police who responded to a report of a prowler at a motorhome in Washington state found a "superhero" inside. Commander Jim Rich told KITI-AM the man in a Green Power Ranger costume appeared lost and disoriented and apparently had been drinking.

You’ve inspired me to remember certain things. 

Yeah she was the hottest girl in school. 

Everybody wanted to fuck her,

even before they knew what that meant.  I remember she

smelled really nice and changed

her perfume the first day of each season,

even if there was still

snow on the ground

the first day of spring.  I heard she was

waitressing at a fancy restaurant

downtown, supporting a five-year-old

while her husband served time. 

I heard he was imprisoned

for assaulting a man who

disrespected her in public. 

I like that. 

“I don’t believe that this is a vicious dog from what she tells me,” Durfee said. “I believe the police are overreacting.”

I’ve been asked to read at The Dog Ears Bookstore

But I keep wanting to place an apostrophe

between the r and s of ears.  But when I think

about the dog ears being

in possession of the bookstore

it makes me more curious

as to why the ears

and not its teeth and paws. 

To make matters worse,

I cannot even imagine teeth and paws

because I don’t imagine the ears

themselves have any body,

or even limitation

that would require a body.  Finally,

if there are dog ears

in possession of a bookstore,

what is their relationship? 

Are they siblings,

a parent and child,

two lovers drawn toward the same sound? 

I prefer to think of them

as two children

climbing toward a point of intersection

the sun at their backs,

others throwing stones,

and the sounds

of branches receding

underneath their tentative weight.

“This one’s incredibly Christmassy. That’s true of the previous ones but I wanted to go for broke. It’s easily the most Christmassy thing you’ll ever see. It’s a huge, sentimental, lovely, jeopardy-driven story. It’s the Christmas special I’d like to see. It’s like a compilation of every Christmas movie. A big Christmas treat. But that doesn’t mean it’s without scares, and that doesn’t mean it’s without heartbreak. It has genuine tragedy in it.”

My earliest memory begins with macaroni

and cheese and beans

and not wanting to eat the beans

and being forced to eat the beans. 

Mr. Bob and his dramatic mustache

captivated class

under his six foot frame.

After that,

I shit my pants in front of everyone

and showed the prettiest girl in class

my pipe cleaner muscles and my clicking wrist. 

She comes over just before Christmas

and helps my family decorate the tree. 

My mother hands her tinsel

and we listen to the California Raisins

singing Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. 

My father walks out with a video camera

and Christopher leaps in front of it

waving his hand like he is casting a spell

shouting “hello” with a wide mouth. 

I force him to the ground

and his body collapses

against the hardwood floor.  Everyone laughs. 

Julie holds up a golden

spray-painted

noodle wreath and asks me

if it is the same golden

spray-painted

noodle wreath I made

for my holiday project

as if there were

suspicions

of other wreaths

of other women

of other Christmas trees

before the one we dressed.  

"There was a case that you could see through, and there were brains in jars and names on the jars. One said 'head trauma, Shipley, J,'" said Samantha Feldman, 22, one of the students."The best friend went outside and was flipping out," Feldman said. "She started crying and called her mom and said, 'Mom, Jesse's brain is here! I can't be here.'"

Billie orders us two shots of Crown as I watch

a man in his late thirties

sitting by the Photo Hunt

air drumming,

which hasn’t been cool,

and let’s be honest here,

for a very, very long time, if ever. 

However, tonight

I’m feeling rather nostalgic and when Slash

begins wailing November Rain

I can’t help but to lip-sync,

“You’re not the only one. 

You’re not the only one.”  

Billie returns during its violent culmination

slides into my side of the booth,

between my legs and up against

my groin.  Shortly after,

we shoot the Crown

and then Layla comes on the jukebox. 

Eric Clapton makes me feel like dropping my pants

and fucking everything in the room. 

Billie sits on my lap and I can feel

the crack of her ass

separating over my thigh

from underneath her skirt.  It arouses me to feel

the heat between her legs

suddenly flushed

against upper thigh. 

When she notices my erection, she inches

further up and kisses me

on the cheek. 

As we watch the shuffle board tournament

coming to a close, her hips rock

deliberately forward and back,

forward and back. 

Pittsburg is in the penalty box

and I just saw a pregnant woman

shooting Southern Comfort. 

Tonight on the way home

we play “No Cop, No Stop,”

and then fuck in my car

just outside her parent’s house.