Alissa is still a clone of a much younger Natalie Portman. She was sidelit by candlelight, in her bathrobe, holding the door a third open and not another inch. The coyness in her smile was unintentional—one can only wonder what it did to his heart.
There are miracles and miracles and I hope this reaches you on one of them.
Worse than trouble is coming.
But there was this.
Jim Bartruff’s work has appeared in Fat City Review, Gambling the Aisle, New Verse News, Two Hawks Quarterly, American Tanka, JAMA, Canto, Barney, Marilyn, and many others. He is a past winner of the William Carlos Williams prize while attending the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and Academy of American Poets prize as a UCLA undergraduate. A third-generation native of Los Angeles, he has been a print journalist, screenwriter, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland, Oregon.