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“Hey, babe,” he said, breathing into the phone like a sex maniac.

Summer’s erosion has begun, all that taking the waves from shore.

I read cookbooks the way I do poetry, with a willingness to be transported.

In high school I walked around with a beat-up copy of Kafka’s stories.

Out by the road was her son standing without a stitch of clothing.

Christopher Woods

It is this—what you hear when you stop listening—that counts.

The thing was, I didn’t care what I ate in front of a woman. Every day, I told her things I would have been too embarrassed to tell anyone else.

I dream of watching my grandfather stagger home through the snow.

Hearing the baby’s cry, Varka finds the enemy who is crushing her heart.

Your hands along her spine. Her hips unfolding like a cotton napkin.

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

This has been a good day. First the milestone of getting to page 300.

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

My father left me in the car while he was grabbing one for the road.

Mr. Holt had grown old since Beverly last saw him. He looked weary.

Does he not see our likeness? Fursten seemed to see nothing.

Beached on the kingdom I learned to swim with my eyes closed.

Their days go over in idleness, and they sigh if the wind but lift a tress.

For eight weeks no one heard my voice for eight weeks no one slept.

He grabbed me, groped for my hips, kissing me, smelling my hair.

Her skin was bruised under her eyes, purple like the swollen toe.

Maybe this was one thing in his life he had done right, or so he hoped.

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

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

It was half the Spanish he knew—stop, I have a shotgun.

Truth, it seems, spills from movies and sitcoms in the wires’ wake.

My sister’s fever wasn’t gone at all, but dazzling—suspended over us.

Screaming, the children flew toward the trees in their saucers.

I stuff cotton in my ears, bits of bird’s nest, anything to stop all that talk.