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At night the voices on the patio sound like small darting birds.

Michael McGriff

They plant whispers where shouts incinerate into hisses.

Let’s rummage through each other’s bodies like a blowout sale.

Through the dark, we say, through the dark: but do we ever really know?

Who are we? Without one another, who will we be?

There’s nowhere he can kiss where she hasn’t been kissed by the sun.

Her biggest secret was Jay Currie—her white American boyfriend.

Here, Min Jin reads from her novel at Narrative Night, New York City.

You don’t know what it’s like to be so hungry that you’d steal to eat.

My father would have ended my clandestine career on the spot.

She bequeathed her children a mother who dreams and smiles.

Like lions in cages, women like me dream . . . of freedom . . .

We crossed the length of Iran to reach a lake so big they called it a sea.

The meeting hall of their bodies piled on lawns caked with dying birds.

Don’t try to find me by spit, by genetic sleuthing, by Are you my?

You try to confess your crime of turning the world into words.

Play hero, sunburned protagonist, awake in our dream.

I think there was a center about which I never even thought to ask.

My childhood is a city where tenderness was frowned upon.

I wish I could tell him he’s not going to hell. It would be so freeing for him.

My new car cost more than my dad’s first house; I Googled it.

She was here. She could not go on. It was the end—the end of the world.

Hard to know what a prisoner believes, what the guard presumes.

Our grandmothers were bakers and nurses, spies and traitors.

The night before my mother’s double mastectomy, we went skinny-dipping.

You are home in your bed like a soft animal with really intense feelers.

Walking on Canal Street, I slipped on the curb and fell on my face.

All of those feelings—you do not have them, they have you.

He loathed them most, despising their desire to get on with things.