They felt comfortable in their resemblances, too comfortable to note that the resemblances contained differences like tripwires cunningly laid and hidden.

Here is your rickety wooden poem. Here is your red, peeling paint poem, your weather-beaten and abused poem. Here is your hands-full-of-slivers poem, knuckle-broken and arthritic.

My old pal Chuck asked me and my sister Stella to drive down east with him. We weren’t doing anything else at the time and so we jumped at the chance.

At first the sound was like a raw stropping of steel on steel although we had little such heavy stuff along...

My beautiful old ones are disappearing slowly. They simply leave, without rules, without a farewell.

You’re certainly not doing itfor the money: that becomesclear when you imagine the weightof two quarters in your palm

In the line (three abreast) that stretchedfrom the dock into the Baggage Roomup the steep flight of stairsto the hall of the Registry Room

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Was it fever or was it the heat that made Antonia perspire so heavily?

After last call at three a.m. the sunon the horizon like a giant lodestarwould guide us over uneven boardwalks and dirt roadstoward the George Black Ferry, acrossthe mud-fed Yukon River to where our hidden worldof tents lay inside a maze of birch,where branches knocked and clacked in the windlike the restless bones of ghosts,where someone always screamed blue murder backat the landlocked sled dogs as they criedand howled at the lingering seasonand stunning lack of darknessinside the night...

I can’t blame youfor claiming this place as your ownpersonal theme park. For you,there is only summer when every curvein the road brings a new photograph—red cliffs climbing out of the sea, field upon fieldof white blossoms, a wharf where boatschristened The Maggie-Mae and Aurora Dawndepart for the fishing grounds.

Insane, adieu. It's summer; there are letters every week. Soft petitions, loud refusals, the usual prayers and prophecies, weather reports, prose in several styles.

i know hate, its line-mates. believe me. you kids have, i’m sure, wasted—all early morning anxious and weak-ankled—their first impatient shuffle-kicks and curses on me.

It isn’t what you think. I’m not just another American gringo,chasing old lady luck South.Staring wide-eyed at their beautiful skin,at the bones of the burros,the dogs and the rats. It’s not why I’ve come, to stare, to open my eyesthis wide, sucking the lemon before I drink.

When the winds came, we lashed ourselves to fir trees because we knew what they were and where they stood.

An excerpt from Moss-Haired Girl by R.H. Slansky, the winning entry in the 2013 International 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest.

Three walked barefoot into the sea,mother, father and only childwith trousers rolled above the knee.A stretch of water—half a mile;granite loaves made a cobbled road when the tide was low. Tide was high.

She lives in Prince George. in plastic bags on tuesday nights we load frozen corpses from industrial-sized freezers into the back of the suzuki.

I began to run across 42nd Street, a trail of beer nuts behind me, making my way to TimesSquare, because I thought I should see The Lion King or smoke crack before I die, but could afford neither.

it’s easy: you pour a mug of beer & then a shot of bourbon. you light a match

Runner-up in the 2nd Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

When I overhear my parents talkabout the death of Dorothy Stratten,the Playboy playmate first discoveredin a Vancouver Dairy Queen,I somehow confuse her with the womanwho sold my family our tent trailer.

From Lemon Hound, a poetry collection published by Coach House books in 2006.

A young boy gets his first pair of tweezers after overhearing locker room conversations about body hair in this excerpt from God Loves Hair by Vivek Shraya.

sat behind the trailers with julie eatingthe peanut butter sandwiches peter’swife made that morning by the park sink