10.2 / March & April 2015

My stalker had one blue eye and one green. Before he became my stalker, he was my lover and I wanted him before he wanted me. During our first date, he kept his distance and I leaned toward his tall strength, his blond silkiness. He tantalized me and set me spinning.

“Welcome to America Loves Mimes Finale,” Ryan Seacrest said to loud cheers from the Grand Ole Opry crowd. After months of competition we are down to our two finalists—Blisters and Irving Irving. The rules are the same with each Mime in a taped off five foot square area.

A woman in a paper bag dress has been outside the diner for three hours. She’s soliciting. “Have you seen this body? Please—I’ve forgotten it—like a language.” I’ve been inside for four, re-reading her love letters. She hasn’t noticed me yet. If she comes in, it’d be for the coffee.

Grandma slapped my foot, uncrossing my legs. You think you grown? Sitting in my house with your legs crossed like you a damn woman. Her bleached nurse’s uniform was starched, stiff as stale white bread stuck to her syrup-colored skin.

I am not very clever today. There’s a strange rain falling: slow drops, yellow sky.     The scientist makes us take personality tests. This seems beneath him.     Given two options, I’m troubled by the worry I could get this wrong:     You feel involved watching TV soaps.

I am returning four rented tuxedos in San Diego the day after my older brother’s wedding. It’s late morning, Sunday, bright and green October. I take the 163 out of the city and down, dense with traffic, between verdant tree-topped hills to the broader and browner 8.

You’ve got me where you want me but what wants are left are paltry; I’ve bailed, searching out the lick in the split crow footprint of your spit, left to dry white astride my thighs.

I will stretch like this for the full of the week, for the sum of all weeks.

When I answer the phone, I know it is my doctor's office. When I listen to the counselor, I know what I need to do, where to go, at what time. When I hang up the phone, I know I feel scared, and anxious, because I don't really know anything.

The things she forgets, that I called her by her last name when we slept together, that we were each looking for something we couldn’t say, holding the barest moments hostage on skin & on paper, that I would be nothing like her in the end, no lilies to say I dare you, I dare

And in this same country, a man lived alone on a hill overlooking the main street of a small town. He could be seen sitting at the front of his house, every day. Sometimes reading, sometimes staring expectantly at the bird feeders he had hung hopefully from nearly every low branch throughout his front yard.

In the mid-1990s, a hippopotamus swallowed a dwarf during a circus accident in northern Thailand. The dwarf bounced sideways off a trampoline trying to turn a somersault while a hippo named Hilda started yawning, bored with the aerial acrobats. Of course no such thing happened, as myriad news outlets reported.

I’d been sending the boys out with the candy bars for a couple of months, them crisscrossing their way through the neighborhoods. Snickers, Crunch, 1000 Grand, all the usuals.

Three years after Wendy Tsai loses her right arm to a southbound Mustang on the Pacific Coast Highway, she hears two reports ring out through her townhouse in Costa Mesa, and upon answering the door, she discovers that the arm has returned.

Colette sprinted up the stairs and crammed into the hallway outside Mae’s kindergarten classroom along with all the other nannies and mothers who were already waiting to gather up lunch boxes and wrap kids in hats and scarves. She was right on time, but some of them gave her the “you’re late” look.