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The Part That Burns

Mafia didn’t like me, except for the tickling game. It went like this.

The Past Is the Present Only Colder

At night everything feels. Even a river feels its way through the woods.

The Pattern of the Scatter

She is eight years old and doesn’t recognize the word divorce.

The Perfect Couple

It had been four weeks and five days since she confronted him.

The Phone Rings

On her sixty-second birthday Marge Olson got a call, not a gift.

The Photographs of Your Life

I saw it on her face that day, a look like her heart would drift into the sky.

The Portrait of What Is Not There

The noiseless trees, the insentient breezes that are not there.

The Profundities and Other Poems

Stop her there, on the bank of knowingness, just before spring.

The Promised Land

She must know she was a mistake, what they call now a surprise.

The Red Studebaker

If your father were here, he wouldn’t put up with your insolence.

The Rembrandt

One felt all the poor lady’s barriers were falling save her manner.

The Rescue

By chance you saw. So much had become chance in your life.

The Resemblance of the Enzymes of Grasses to Those of Whales Is a Family Resemblance

This morning I watched two elephants dance the boogie-woogie.

The Right Fielder

Far below, the right fielder circles and stares, mitt raised to the sky.

The River

He said, You have no brother. I didn’t know what he meant. I do now.

The Rooms

In the rooms you picked up what you liked, like shells on a beach.

The Rose Window

It swims for a while, but abandons itself, slips from its own grasp.

The Saltcutter’s Wife

The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.

The Sea Pebble

The people with pebbles go home to frolic under the detritus of the day.

The Shaker

My friend Angela, who is also my roommate, got me into stripping.

The Small Hours

The past, you hear it, the small hours, sucked down the undertow.

The Spectacular

What’s a man supposed to do when his best friend is a falcon?

The Spectators

Never issue a dare to a dead person. They’ve got all the time in the world.

The Speed of Dark

I have studied and become intimate with the speed of darkness.

The Store in Which I Am Turned to a Widow

Outside of Ikea’s window the nighttime wind tilts like a folk song.

The Storm of the Century

She often feels something kinetic between herself and younger men.

The Story of an Hour

There would be no one to live for; she would live for herself.

The Sweater

I hold out hands, empty and poor like a beggar by the temple door.

The Third Round

If you let me live, I will buy you beer whenever I see you in town.

The Trees Named “Glowing Embers”

Little footage, this plot, where it thrived at first, then ghosted away.