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Family & Ancestorsexpand_moreHer sly smile was a vicious remnant of her life before Real Life began.
The past is never done with. It begs to be fed, demands to be eaten.
Pale dust clung to their skin like the lime he had thrown on the dead.
I floated in the tub, my head bobbing, until I felt slick as a seal.
For a moment I had the delicious feeling of fitting in without even trying.
She had learned that it was easy to get Sylvi to do things.
The world is where we brace for a joke that’s about to be played on us.
Descent jumps and jostles, nausea drops me back to the floodplain.
She offered her face up for what should be a brotherly kiss.
She’d lifted the plot from a TV show she’d watched the night before.
She looks in the mirror above the sink, and her image makes eye contact.
Nothing was permanent, no friend I made, no math test I took.
Rise the Euphrates, my first novel, grew out of a feverish dream.
Kenny Wade makes do with short-term schemes and part-time work.
I hear Tchaikovsky when I close my eyes and pretend I’m flying.
A wildness and all the ways I could never be classy enough for pearls.
Brassy bullets fell against the floral comforter like little candies.
Well, back home has really changed, you won’t get that same bammy.
Tomorrow I’ll be ratted out about the hunting, but I knew it’d be worth it.
“Look in my eyes. Do I look like someone who has heard this story?”
1908. The puppet’s name is Sambo. Oh what a friendly boy he looks to be!
The alert says Warning: Wild Exotic Animals Loose.
The new generation doesn’t play war, which is a shame; they text.
Like a bird with a broken wing I will smudge the line of the hopscotch.
Sometimes in sunlight the scar shines, skin smooth and tight.
The sun falls back and vanishes like the men in my family who’ve died.
Peter Taylor’s stories are jigsaw puzzles of nuance and suggestion.
A family altar stuffed with dead family hanging now above the TV.
You have to be three times better than the white kids, at everything.
I saw myself, and for the first time, I didn’t look away.
