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Quiver and Other Poems

It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps the evening you died.

Rain

You can call it karma if you can see that far, or joy-begets-sorrow.

Rainy Season

The transformation of their maid from shadow to sexpot thrills Maizie.

Reading from His Story “Screenwriter”

My first suicidal ideations occurred to me when I was ten, eleven, twelve.

Reading from His Story “Screenwriter”

As soon as her grandparents left, BLAM, the dance in her died.

Reading Henry James in the Suburbs

She had boyfriends before she met him. Well, not really boyfriends.

Reading Her Poetry

Better to be a bird without altitude. Or to get out of the game early.

Reading Her Poetry

I was once a rider of mastodons, a waitress showing skin.

Reading His Poetry

All down my street the new fathers beat the kingness out of the kings.

Reading His Poetry

She does not know within a decade she will unload a slug into her mouth.

Reading His Poetry

Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash.

Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home

Reasonable Men

Keaton didn’t control his emotions; he put them to use.

Reckless Disregard: The Politics of Insincerity

Lust for power and money undermined their morality and common sense.

Reconsidering Paul Bowles

The appetite for self-surrender is nothing new in our makeup.

Red Dress—1946

My head was muffled in velvet, my body exposed in an old slip.

Red Flag Warning

Pale dust clung to their skin like the lime he had thrown on the dead.

Redemption

No one asked that, changed as he was, he do more than survive.

Redemption Song, Part One

Ivan rolled his eyes, and looked at the sky like someone about to be martyred.

Redemption Song, Part Three

The suite cost as much as a two-pound brick of Panama Red.

Refinement

For a moment I had the delicious feeling of fitting in without even trying.

Reflections on How Writers Make a Living

Our culture cherishes a fantasy of a certain writerly existence.

Reflections on Newtown: No Safe Place

If it were fiction, calling the place Newtown would be too much.

Rehearsals

She had learned that it was easy to get Sylvi to do things.

Repossession

Shit happens, you still have to pay up or lose it all, even if it ain’t your fault.

Requiem

Isn’t it nice to think tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes yet?

Resolution

Someone’s walk is pretty much who they are, from the beginning.

Respectability and Other Poems

Carte blanche is bodily as chalk on dark asphalt, so enliven these eyes.

Restless

If this farmer worried about her husband, he gave no sign.

Reverend Thornhill’s Wife

Her previous existence seemed unreal, now, a faint rumor.