Browse Topics

Saying Its Name

When Illness Is A Secret

I swore to hate the woman who told me to undress, who sat me on the examining table, and who took my father away to talk with him outside my presence. I hated her for her chilly brusqueness, for having seen me in my underpants, and for having mentioned within earshot the words cystic fibrosis.

Selected Poems

Sunbeams

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

Henry David Thoreau

Poor Mortals

Larry couldn’t stop thinking of Mrs. Foster. He thought he must be in love with her. He never raised his hand in any class except hers. The other teachers didn’t seem to care whether he answered questions or not.

Selected Poems

Even the page says, / Don’t spill that ink / on this unspoiled white. / Your scribbles are / so broken, your words / so bald, so patent, / they reveal your / mediocrity.

—from “Hierophant”

in rejection i remain

the collected letters of william penrod

i keep sending query letters to publishers and agents and hatcheck girls, but nary a reply do i get. i pray for a reply every night: just tell me to go shit in my hat, i pray. then i’ll know that my stuff has at least been delivered.

Sunbeams

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Orson And Me

And now I know that He wants me to try to write a book again and that this time I’ll succeed.

Sunbeams

This republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.

Elmer Davis

Sunbeams

Why do you go and build a monument to a man who sends electricity through a wire? Does not nature do that millions of times over? Is not everything already existing in nature? What is the value of your getting it? It is already there.

Vivekananda