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“There’s got to be some way through this,” he says, “without losing her.”

Do you really want to live in this filth? And me answering, Well, yes.

I take what I want, and have ever since what I want disappeared.

The streets were filled with couples and families on their way home.

You locate the green outline of the state your cousins are inside of now.

I push the stroller across the courts to the scene of the thing I don’t get.

“Why, Ma? I don’t understand. I just don’t want you to be alone.”

I am determined to praise my particular world, so I must praise you.

Edward the Funny didn’t have much to laugh about in his midthirties.

He took off his clothes and left them on the living room floor.

She heard the lowing of cattle, shouting, the crack of whips.

Writing at night just feels . . . sneaky. There’s an outlaw quality to it.

To be married is to learn to love, captive in your own new country.

Everything comes down to the lightning. Nothing is ever by chance.

Now all I was, all I had ever been, when it came down to it, was a tenant.

The leaves repeat my fall in choruses more ancient than my own.

Janet Burroway

I dream we ride together in a Subaru to the county fair.

The before as strange as the after but beforelife isn’t a word.

No one could prove it, but we were sure the neighbor shot the horse.

Sue Mell

A nearly perfect guitar fell from the sky and landed in my mom’s azaleas.

My husband collects bruises, counts how many rise above the skin.

Having his ex-wife in the house was a distraction. He forgot to grieve.

Clayton always imagined getting laid in the rooms of his dad’s motel.

Was this where he would grow old? Would it all end in a room like this?

My husband shovels snow from flower beds back onto the drive.

If someone looked into his eyes they would see how ugly his mind was.

Motionless at the window. Forehead beaded with a line of fevered moons.

He hit all of us sometimes, but he hit me hardest and the most.