Birds of Malaiseville

Dove into swimming pools the way she said Navy Seals do: upright, with their arms crossed over their chest.

Orange mercurochrome stains from skateboarding in culottes in those abandoned apartment complexes in Santa Clarita.

I think I can say that the parents’ suffering did not diminish their faith. Amen. It would have mine.

Neither married nor given in marriage. That’s rich, tell her, coming from the world’s most desirable bachelor.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar held my father’s face in His hands. This was it. “Earvin?” Kareem said. "Earvin asked."

My brother, you are seen. It's no relief to be done with physical beauty. Some men can let go. Certain others, you and I, never stop measuring.

Because I know that promises plague my wife’s heart*, I know that one night she’ll redirect herself.

I’ve gone to church for 50 years and have liked it best only when it’s over.

The Devil is no help to my marriage. He makes nicknames for the clothes my wife wears that he knows I don’t like.

“Thank you, please, but no,” I say when offered the soup. Dead people can’t eat in dreams, so it seems best that I don’t either.

My life is no longer ahead of me, Matthew Stafford Baby, and my Double Thickburger will be nothing like the advertisement.

The seed, Aleksandr, the seed! my father, crowing to Solzhenitsyn about me, his only boy, lurching through woods behind wayward rototiller.

The grackle is a walker. The robin too. Songbirds? Hoppers. Pheasants and partridge?

Nightly I aimed it to avoid the afterglow of God and received what I could in the static.

I can’t outwork my father-in-law, who grew up on a farm and goes about hard jobs steadily, stern as a man killing possums.

It’s late afternoon in eternity. Early spring. The cold and the sunshine make the blue membrane of the atmosphere look taut.

My sister would want you to know this about her: after I came along, her debt clock began clicking and remained dynamic all her life. She was owed.

He drives a truck that looks like a fighter jet and backs it in so it’s face-first. Always flexing.

A bugler will play “Taps” but not “Hail to the Victors” because I lost the nerve to ask.

"He's taking what Mr. Trump is taking," my mother-in-law told my wife. "Don't even," I said.

One imagines mud on bleary headlights, corn stalks and field grass caught in the undercarriage, a side mirror hanging boozily from the door.

Everybody but you nodding. Everybody but you singing along on the chorus. You didn't know the song then.

My grandfather is a drunk and lost and he and I never knew each other, but we share this: we’re overcome by even meager kindness.

Her eyeballs are vibrating and my mother doesn’t see me at first. For those seconds, I am and am not her son.

This long in heaven my grandfather sees limits to perfection. When the weather turns, his scars itch.