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Poor boy, he only wanted to love some man—who knows who?

Grandma was forced to break her vow of silence only three times.

The band was amateur at best. It didn’t matter. People loved them.

They come to America and their child is shot down like a wild animal.

He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Drowning people will do anything for air.

In the closet: a single hair draped from the one hanger left.

Howie and Nadine were confident they’d be among the survivors.

The clearest memory was when his father shot a grizzly.

My ups and downs never stop on the hump we call a hill behind the house.

I can’t struggle against joy and suffering inseparable.

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

I bought two for my wedding, planted them in pots on the patio by the pond.

Don’t hitchhike the Mediterranean coast of Algeria in the summer of ’71.

We’re all trying, in our own ways, to parse what we may have done wrong.

I could shoot you and nobody would say boo. I’m within my rights.

Soledad is the name a woman is given, a sentence a woman must serve.

Try to make order in one direction, and things shoot off in another.

I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah.

On Christmas Day, we lost one of our great advocates for poetry.

On this small island, everyone knows who comes, especially who goes.

You might say I acted on instinct. All I wanted was to stop the screaming.

Ahab went mad when he saw the sea is just the sea and nothing more.

I know what my promises are worth, know the worth of material things.

This summer I mothered my brother’s death; I brothered my mother’s cancer. My brother and mother died this summer, two of seven billion.

Room painted off-white, so the death rattle can lean off the wall.

I ought to haul out this junk I called winter and lose it somewhere.

Maybe all of it was possible. Maybe it all could work out.

My cry for the first time fastened garlands of hope to the roof.

You remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.

The girl I was could not have imagined the woman I grew up to become.