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Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

I’m always driving through the desert, on the interstate’s black river.

Their leader is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others.

Each time he retells that morning my dad forgets I was there too.

she will unchew the dried bulbs of history, spit them at the foot of her post.

I never entered no-man’s-land by any light brighter than the palest moon.

When you turn fifty, you have to prove to yourself you’ve got something left.

He was shirtless and showcasing a large tattoo of the Twin Towers.

We could hear the parade three blocks before it arrived at our corner.

The summer Victor died, his dad spoke to no one but the canaries he kept.

Before sunrise I counted nine meteors scratching the heavens.

Sundays, your wife at Mass, we locked ourselves in my room.

Third Place

The small, inadequate marks follow the outline, things left behind.

Mistaking water hemlock for parsley, I die hours later in the hospital.

I’m guilty—locating my gratitude against someone else’s suffering.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

Mild nights would have us out of doors—at their opening I am rapt.

I have a maple in the yard and from time to time all is distant.

Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.

With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?

She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.

The truth has always been thus and the response the same.

It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.

How bright and eager they appear, how ready to get started.

Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.

Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.

It doesn’t matter who he is. I don’t think about him much anymore.

Sherman Alexie