Authors

Death pointed the gun in his socket and blew off some of his skull.

“You are a strange one,” she says. “Do you want to see my new tattoo?”

Our ambition was a clawing, grasping thing. It got us out of bed.

I waited and waited, rethinking first sentences in my sleep.

Everything is mine on loan: the leaves I’ve combed out of my hands.

I’d make a tub of mud to keep live crabs. I’d refill it daily.

For eight weeks no one heard my voice for eight weeks no one slept.

Do the work. Every day. Take a step back and see if you love it.

No one answered. I turned to his parents. My stomach felt on fire.

I’m a slave to the question what kind of music would ever dare leave you.

One door teaches to read for meaning and pleasure. Another shuts.

In the many pages of the book of love this is only one story.

Noelle, somewhere symphony number two listens to you breathing.

Condemned to an easy life balanced on the suffering in another land.

A man sits in the Institute of National Memory examining files.

Love is not something you wait for passively, but a practice.

O Fatima if only you would lean my way my heart would quiver.

Our fathers sit in their gear looking as mean as we knew them to be.

The one who sold me a smuggled gun sold me smuggled bullets.

I wish to see the land release my heart from the corpse of longing.

The first murder had been a half dozen years ago in a warmer city.

It was a Tuesday, so they made love. She thought it was a fair compromise.

A plus B; a child in peril, plus love, dissolution of, equals a story.

You came to me in a hanbok dream, fluttering as it flew in.

We inked our flightless limbs with needles and drew longing to the skin.

Some days are stretched so taut it feels like changing might break us. We feed the baby bitter melon, flower pepper, bloodroot beet. The first snow comes in January, fresh gauze over an old wound.

We are teachers so maybe we can help something change, tap into something.

When I walked in, the kids applauded. They were like, “The poet’s back!”

Take this man, Stepan. His deep mellow voice soars in my heart.

Human language, Winston thought, was not adequate for spiritual union.

My first memory is the day of mourning after John Lennon died.

“Why don’t you say anything, people? These thugs are murdering me!”

The war was about to begin, and the four boys were
in charge.

three women came in their nakedness so i could choose from among them

She wants something red and shiny that always works.