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1908. The puppet’s name is Sambo. Oh what a friendly boy he looks to be!

The alert says Warning: Wild Exotic Animals Loose.

You put his hand around your throat but he keeps moving it away.

“Dorm whores” his roommate calls them. They come for the booze.

He finds the note taped to the lid of the toilet: “There’s someone else.”

Christopher Woods

Her will is resolute, and he knows enough not to challenge it.

The clearest memory was when his father shot a grizzly.

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

He probably had an order. Ludes, Dexis, Black Birds—who knew.

I think you’re carrying on to get your brothers in trouble.

Fresh from Texas. She has the head of a girl & a serpent’s body.

A Midwestern man is never without his knife. Half of us carry guns.

The willows crack as the startled deer flee into a deeper darkness.

Try to make order in one direction, and things shoot off in another.

Does he not see our likeness? Fursten seemed to see nothing.

Beached on the kingdom I learned to swim with my eyes closed.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven!

Poetry isn’t work, he said, unless you’re talking about reading it.

A plastic Kroger’s bag caught in the chinking—Spelter’s only banner.

Both dogs were barking now—their barking urgent, hysterically pitched.

Oklahoma, a state shaped like a pot, probably some gruel inside.

I ought to haul out this junk I called winter and lose it somewhere.

He could smell the bear’s breath, feel the hot huff against his ear.

The boy imagined his dead grandfather haunting the world.

“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.

It was half the Spanish he knew—stop, I have a shotgun.

My sister’s fever wasn’t gone at all, but dazzling—suspended over us.

This is a place where young girls are butchered in old-time songs.

Trysting lovers kissed while breezes fidgeted the leaves.