It's easy in the sense that all you have to do is get in the car and fire up the app. It's hard in that it requires long, monotonous hours to be fruitful, and constant vigilance to stay safe. San Francisco is a tough city to drive.

As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

Why did he shape my brother’s body to the contours of war? Is this the shape of all our language already?

If I had known all boats eventually yield / to the current, I would have readied myself / long ago

He wasn’t a particularly good Dad (though we weren’t great kids, either, loud and ravenous, always asking for pizza or pocket change), but the holiday didn’t call for distinctions of merit.

"I've always been interested in the invisible poem. When a poem is finished, what is the undercurrent? What is it still trying to say?"

I am OK to go / into another / dimension / a vision of / vast idiocy / and solitude / release it / through my / otherly abled limbs

Touch them, the tesserae, the shards of floating glass, which skim the rain-full gutter. Not dead: us/them—mere stutters, gluttons for new skin. Life, peel back your veil. Now, see? See it again: To be dead another time is a deciduous explosion.

I once drove around southwest Arizona with a photographer named Pedro, from Mexico City. His specialty was making ethnographic forays into North America,…

My old friend and former teacher Steve Orlen and I walked many miles together along the wide avenues of Tucson, Arizona. Our promenades usually took place…