The body’s just a bookmark for a shipyard cook who’s going to lose a few nights of watching television A cheap detective novel folded between pages 73 and 74, where the cops talk like this:

Life starts with a few words on a
birth certificate. Then there’s a
lot of paperwork. Right before
someone’s name gets carved on
a tombstone, I get called in
to figure out what went wrong ...

A pile of bills that won’t get paid anytime soon sits on the back of the couch, tossed into a hat Everything is permanently unfinished, except for the redhead from the escort agency he called last night, sitting on the couch with a high heel dangling off of her left foot, offering her boredom as an alibi ever since she got picked up this morning. -from Lawrence Goeckel's piece, "Along the Pacific Coast Highway." Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction Issue 7.