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I put my hand on my stomach and had an image of the melting snowman.

they released themselves so knowingly into the soft wet air

There’s no studying for this. I think souls must exist in wanted things.

“Is that your banana?” the short cop asked her.

I never prayed before. Since this happened I’ve been praying every night.

I made him love me. To feel abandonment—again.

Whatever was wrong with his brain, he could still smell her skin.

I bought chips from the one open store, but can’t figure out how to eat them.

My sister says, vicious as possible, “Don’t you dare try to protect me.”

I became a realist the moment they tied a brick to my balls.

After her divorce she took up with a cowboy named Wicks.

He can’t remember the last time they made love. It has become a game.

You decide that in this city all things are possible, even happiness.

That’s how a lifetime passes, closing the wound, a million stitches.

Mark was spending his life with one of the world’s weaklings.

Break me like bread. Take me apart. Strip each rib down to light.

damn it we both die anyway at different times, with different pains

His eyes, dark brown and unwavering as he delivered the details.

I felt that Teddy occupied a range below acceptability, even among boys.

Our griefs perceive what we dismiss: the slight give of stage boards.

He’s walking loopy, so I know he’s been had something besides beer.

The orderlies see him in the mirror and mistake it for his twin.

Ralph’s children had believed Christine was just after his money.

She was bad. A cool bad. All third-graders wanted bad like hers.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

I’m always driving through the desert, on the interstate’s black river.

Their leader is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others.

Maybe that’s what she feels, not stranded, but suspended in time.

I had pasted a pink Post-it to my phone screen that said DON’T DRINK.