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Robin Troy

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

For Henry Moore there is not only the best day but the worst.

Don’t worry baby, that’s just the way things be sometimes.

It’s hard to save your own life, to take such extreme measures alone.

She was so beautiful and sweet to us. I remember she laughed a lot.

she had big eyes, the better to see right through a person.

Abe shot himself, first year out of high school. Assholes said he was queer.

“A book is an ax,” Franz Kafka once said, “for the frozen sea within.”

“Leaving for war, Hayes wept. He didn’t just cry; he wept...”

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

I’m the astronomer unable to lower his telescope, or look away.

I began to look for evidence of my father’s duplicity in his body.

Live Dangerously! If you get hurt, the suffering will bring a new being.

A goddam mean big sonofabitch boar rooted me in the stomach.

Each evening spent guessing which hemisphere the moon might wreck.

“Just sex,” I say, and the old feeling is back, the creeping nausea.

He sobbed; he said he would go to therapy, stop drinking.

What can go heartbreakingly wrong, and what would you do?

He saw the car bearing down and gave it the finger, a snarl on his face.

They felt smarter and sexier, especially when together.

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

A woman from the next table eyed him and he eyed her right back.

The pumpkins are looking up my skirt, making orange a kind of festive.

She stopped, turned toward him, placed her hand on his chest.

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

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

His eyes rested on the trees. By George, it’s like the garden of Eden.

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

The baby in her belly is not a sibling, will never be their playmate.