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The allure of Mardi Gras is to feel this way: unseen and unseeable.

A boy watching another boy lucky gets an ache. That is a small motor.

We never really had what might be considered a normal conversation.

A father peeled the night / from another midnight & begged / me to lie

For me, Selweh was the real magic. She was nothing like my mother.

Three months is a long time to be away from the person you love.

My desire to be in sync with him had nearly been my undoing.

I needed a paycheck a lot more than I needed to be kissed.

I was convinced she’d be back in the morning, like the sun.

The chocolate was old, dusty white, the way chocolate gets after many years.

How much, I thought, such stolid suffering resembles love. Planets don’t change direction as easily as love.

There was something in her voice, some awful, enduring fire.

To articulate sweet sounds together is to work harder than all these.

I’ll see you on the sea, they say, but then they float past on a raft

He tuned the future backward as he left the ringing water to reclaim me.

I want to say hold these harp strings steady atop the tallest summit.

What if my mother could have been happy if I hadn’t been born?

He said he had come back to the prison because it was home.

At the memorial service, I could barely hear the student read.

The author reflects on a soldier’s experience, in just six words.

Here is my aphorism of the day: Happy people are monogamous.

Death is a lack, I suppose, and love more so. But I will not falter.

From the flight deck Gray could see home, wherever that might be.

He guessed it was the worst thing he had ever seen or maybe ever would.

The towns died as quickly as a single house, a house like ours, lit gold within.

I’m mourning in the armpits of a lover we once called a family friend.

We’ve seen the news. We know the story. How even our bodies hurt us.

The hound, the leash, the fence, the hens. So many of them.

My relationship with god resembled that of a prisoner and firing squad.

Why did it take Steven’s small coffin to get me to see my own son?