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I felt awful about imposing on him, but I was desperate to see the Derby.

Mikey said the hole wouldn’t lead to China, but he was frequently wrong.

The cicada will crawl up a tree and leave the murmur of skin.

Oh love is stupid but it’s true, all day I feel as if I were a dog on a chain.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know my father’s grief.

There are elephants in the hall looking for their mothers.

A voice like my mother’s nail polish and my father’s lottery tickets.

How, like a dream, all the world’s characters are aspects of me.

Lately it’s getting harder to say the true thing, to find solace in nature.

An owl, as large
and incongruous in the night sky as a flying man.

An owl, as large and incongruous in the night sky as a flying man.

I can remove my hand the second it becomes too much for me.

“You see,” Sister Elba said, smiling, “you should never doubt him.”

Premonitions return to me like a carrier pigeon, disaster strapped to its leg.

My husband once said he wanted to die eaten by a panther.

I was a skinhead in look and seem, a balding guy trying out the future.

I dream we ride together in a Subaru to the county fair.

No one could prove it, but we were sure the neighbor shot the horse.

He wondered how others lived with their sins. Maybe they never did.

The celebration stops, like a sparrow hitting a sliding-glass door.

My husband shovels snow from flower beds back onto the drive.

What I eat, that heap has eaten. What I like, it gets, but less of.

There, in the courtyard, a man might sit and call himself your friend.

I know about sex. It’s not a cardinal flying into the wrong window.

She examines her left hand, finger by finger, gripping and pinching the flesh.

We serve them far more than they serve us. Service animals, we all are.

Order gardening clogs, then realize you feel like a runaway nurse.

The moths were the things that invaded, like a bad man’s touch.

You’re too far from where I sit to admire your finery up close.

I’d have guessed the winter this way, every bitter plum already singing.