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I see a young ZZ Top smiling, eyes darting from my shirt to my beard.

Our fathers sit in their gear looking as mean as we knew them to be.

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

No one is dead, but you should come back. See what’s become of us.

The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.

I thought that proved he blamed me. I thought they all did.

What better place to write the great American novel than North Africa?

In Ovid’s tale, the virgin Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law.

I’m trying to manage my dumb-dumb time machine brain and be here.

She pulls quickly on her cigarette and blows it at me through the phone.

When I saw my father for the last time, we both did the same thing.

My father was at an awful disadvantage in a sport where cunning is a virtue.

Three lives I flicked alight with a few match scrapes. I cupped them.

What my father and I destroyed, I take back—kneeling, among the shells.

“were all here pregaming. at my dads apt. Wher the duck are u.”

No one answered. I turned to his parents. My stomach felt on fire.

That day he stood on some threshold and paused and wept at his choice.

There was a blue wool afghan draped across the back of the couch.

I am drawn to these victims because I was there the night they were killed.

He’s clear about his wishes: to die in this house, in his own bed.

You don’t feel anything when they cut you, not at first, just the blood.

I can’t see a way out of this. Things will not necessarily get better.

Each harbored a sense that a family of three was not a real family.

Here’s the part where you pledge devotion until death, I told myself.

He thinks with joy and conviction that the Japanese are his enemy.

“She was breakable, and I probably knew it from the start.”

“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have done it, but they had it coming.”

Every voice an epitaph, and then a little tune from the neighbor’s yard.