He smelled like sand and tar and wind, gasoline and sawdust and oranges. He smelled like Los Angeles.

I would show them Monroe and make hot chocolate with whipped cream and mini mashmallows for us to share.

My mom looked like she hadn't gotten out of bed all day. I brought her Brazil nuts and ginger ale and red licorice. I would have tried to cook but I always burned the grilled cheese sandwiches or let the rice bubble over. The only thing I could make was instant mac and cheese but she didn't want that and neither did I. I wished she had taught me to cook when I was littler and she was happy and loved to make dinner but now it was probably too late.

[...] the cassette he played, a woman's raspy voice singing over raucous chords. She was whispering something about horses again and again. I'd never heard anything like it. Finally, I asked who she was. "Patti Smith. Isn't she cool?" He handed me the cassette. It had a picture of a gaunt, androgynous person in a white shirt, a string of black tie hanging loose around her neck. [...]"

Bear brought him into the kitchen where Fox, Tiger, and Buck were eating their lunch of vegetable stew and rice, baked apples and blueberry gingerbread. They asked the gardener to join them.

Sometimes at night, gathered around the long wooden table finishing the peach-spice or apple-ginger pies and raspberry tea, they would tell stories of their youth – the things they had suffered separately when they went out alone to try the world. The stories were of freak shows and loneliness and too much liqour or powders and the shame of deformity.

The gardener was invited to share in the cherrymint pie she had made for the evening, and he spoke with her, asked about the books she liked to read (they brought her children's stories of magic, and old novels with thick, yellowish pages about passionate women in brutal landscapes) and the music she listened to, did she sew her own dress?

She loved to plant the beds with lillies and wisteria. camelias and gardenias, until her hands were caked with earth. To arrange the flowers in the vase like dancing sisters. To make the salmon in pomegranate sauce; the salads of spinach, red onion, pine nuts, oranges, and avocados; the golden vanilla cream custards; the breads and piecrusts that powdered her with flour.

One of our assignments was to write about your perfect dream day. I wonder what this boy's perfect dream day would be. Probably to get to fuck Pamela Lee or something. Unless he was really cool as I hoped, in which case it would be to wake up in a bed full of cute puppies and eat a bowl full of chocolate chip cookies in milk and get on a plane and get to go to a warm, clean, safe place (the cats and dogs would arrive there later, not at all stressed from their journey) where you could swim in blue-crystal water all day naked without being afraid and you could lie in the sun and tell your best friend (who was also there) your funniest stories so that you both laughed so hard you thought you'd pop and at night you got to go to a restaurant full of balloons and candles and stuffed bears, like my birthdays when I was little, and eat mounds of ice cream after removing the circuses of tiny plastic animals from on top.

I stopped at the liqour store and bought a bag of pretzels and a Mountain Dew because I hadn't eaten all day and my stomach was talking pretty loud.

One day Rose Red takes Rose White farther away than they have been before. They are in the woods gathering berries – which they eat till their hands and tongues are purple – burying their faces in the pine needles, practicing bird calls, chasing butterflies.

In the morning they feed the Bear again and help themselves to bread and honey and cheese, milk and berries.They go out into the woods. Neither of them mentions the idea of going home. They forange for food for the Bear. Roots, nuts, more berries.

There were translucent sweet red and green fruits shaped like hearts, bright gold roasted-tasting grains shaped like stars, huge ruffley purple vegetables and small satiny blue ones. Everything smelled fresh and rich and light, and Beauty found herself stooped over her plate, licking it, like a wild animal.

We got the flu and ate rice balls and miso soup in the bathtub.

I don't blame earth for shaking because she is probably so sick of people fucking with her all the time - building things and poisoning her and that.

She had made a meal of jasmine rice, coconut milk, fresh mint, and chiles. There were tall glasses of mineral water with slices of lime like green moons rising above clear bubbling pools. There was a glass bowl full of gardenias.

the motion of the human heart;

strangled over Missouri;

sheathed in hot wax in Boston;

burned like a potato in Norfolk;

lost in the Allegheny Mountains;

found again in a 4-poster mahogany bed

in New Orleans;

drowned and stirred with pinto beans

in El Paso;

hung on a cross like a drunken dog

in Denver;

cut in half and toasted in

Kalamazoo;

found cancerous on a fishing boat

off the coast of Mexico;

tricked and caged at Daytona Beach;

kicked by a nursery maid

in a green and white ghingham dress,

waiting table at a North Carolina

bus stop;

rubbed in olive oil and goat

piss

by a chess-playing hooker in the East Village;

painted red, white, and blue

by an act of Congress;

torpedoed by a dyed blonde

with the biggest ass in Kansas;

gutted and gored by a woman

with the soul of a bull

in East Lansing;

petrified by a girl with tiny fingers,

she had one tooth missing,

upper front, and pumped gas

in Mesa;

the motion of the human heart goes on

and on

and on and on

for a while.

when God created love He didn't hepl most

when God created dogs He didn't help dogs

when God created plants that was average

when God created hate we had a standard utility

when God created me He created me

when God created the monkey He was asleep

when God created the giraffe He was drunk

when God created narcotics He was high

and when He created suicide He was low

when He created you lying in bed

He knew He was doing

He was drunk and He was high

and He created the mountains and the sea and fire

at the same time

He made some mistakes

but when He created you lying in bed

He came all over His Blessed Universe.

the boy walks with his muddy feet across my soul talking about recitals, virtuosi, conductors, the lesser known novels of Dostojevsky; talking about how he corrected a waitress, a hasher who didn't know that French dressing was composed of so and so; he gabbles about the Arts until I hate the Arts, and there is nothing cleaner than getting back to a bar or back to the track and watching them run, watching things go without this clamor and chatter, talk, talk, talk, the small mouth going, the eyes blinking, a boyt, a child, sick with the Arts, grabbing at it like the skirt of a mother, and I wonder how many tens of thousands there are like him across the land on rainy nights on sunny mornings on evenings meant for peace in concert halls in cafes at poetry recitals talking, soiling, arguing.

it's like a pig going to bed with a good woman and you don't want the woman any more.

Flowers which as in a dream at sunset I watered faithfully not knowing how much I loved them.