When the water recedes, a flock of / small stones appears along the shore

My mother wrote a poem on her deathbed / after five bleak months of leukemia. / Something in Arabic to the effect of, Why me?

My Jewish wife and I / went into the Old City / through Damascus Gate / to eat sweet orange squares of knafeh.

Isabella Rosselini said she loved her father’s big belly / because it reminded her of how he used to sit in bed / all day writing

Meanwhile, my sister and I / rate our father’s revenge stories by punchline.

It’s not the first time / someone did wrong, and you / smelled your blame

Some call this cloud work, some call / this clever crows riding the updrafts.

Who you are, what made me assent—all I know’s I was hopeful and bored / reposing in the Delta Sky Club

Foxes keep showing up. Their voice contains a baby crying at night.

After death the heart sometimes keeps beating / a little. Or after it’s removed / from the body.

I thought I was undesirable. Unlovable, sounding / Just like a Bachelor lead, with way less privilege, not / Kissing generically gorgeous ladies in Forever 21 gowns.

“Define Situationship” should really / be a Jeopardy! question

But we arrive to find it’s been co-opted by a cocktail bar. / The Moss wants to bounce but we’re already here.

Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.

to bend over whenever. This belief reaches / quietly into their bone marrow.

But for me, Earl’s short poems (sometimes, I’m willing to concede, laid over monotonous beats) are speculative and visionary. They map a modern mind, short in attention, fighting to be audible …

Well, a lot happens in our lives every day. We experience so many things and most of what we experience—most of what we see and feel and smell and touch and taste—we forget. Because there's just …

On an external hard drive stored in a closet somewhere at home, I have a photo from the first concert I set up, a moment captured on a roll of film and later scanned and sent via email.

The last time I was here I was really in here. I have been here. I know that I have been here. These people are in my home and they are watching my TV.

I was born March 24th, the same day as Harry Houdini, so my family used to take annual trips to the Harry Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.