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Here we were, seventeen, trapped by the sheer number of bodies.

I’ve made a rigorous effort. But it’s been hard, this hug embargo.

I will never know what my mother guessed or didn’t suspect.

My brother, only his son by the way he fixes his tie, blind-fingered.

To be married is to learn to love, captive in your own new country.

There is the ghost of a child in me. It longs to die, so afraid of living.

You can dive still see half the Spanish castle, its stone pile a trap

“Tell me that everything will be okay,” I whispered to the photo.

My husband collects bruises, counts how many rise above the skin.

I put my arm around Larry’s shoulders and ask him to pull over.

From the deck, the burnished red peel of an apple beckons temptingly.

Phuong feared that she was nothing but a regret born into flesh.

He will, no doubt, be out of this house soon, headed over to Montgomery.

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

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

You’d probably prefer to sneak back into me very still, swollen.

By the kitchen sink, my aunt held a fish as if holding the Holy Body.

In hushed awe they talk of things to come, a golden time of flowering.

I'll pick a black card of luck for you: star, pinkmoon, mirror, ostrich eye.

Elsewhere, perhaps here too, regimes stagger, a congress ends.

There was only the gulf of our steps, our breathing brittle as string.

It is here I learn the speech of men. The speechless guilt of every swig.

Everything hung in perfect balance. Light and dark, heaven and hell.

i was a wild thing down by the river, quiet like wild things are.

he has come to write like nervous wasps in my mind like a grocery list.

What right had Flora, of all people, to pronounce on what was strange?

In the school smock, I looked like an angel in search of her crèche.

Was he a good man or a bad man? Was it necessary, even, to speculate?

“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”

She’ll grow into a beauty, but she needn’t contend with that yet.