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Real ones get through again and again.

She was the idiot who fell in love with some high-class gigolo.

He felt desperate for the rains, mosquitoes be damned.

Since the accident she lost her hold on the world and never got it back.

Now I’m no longer the buzzards glooming over the mango tree.

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

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

My imagination has been weak lately, caught in some half-world.

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

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens her first rose

I keep an eye on my shit—this body, this lost cause, this bad joke— I want to be good at more than just childlessness and tying balloon animals.

When I wasn’t teaching social studies, I basically lived on my balcony.

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

My children, children, remember to let me go, delete my number.

I grip the handlebar and pin my eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable crash.

She pulls quickly on her cigarette and blows it at me through the phone.

“If the world is becoming a void, the artist must fill it with his soul.”

I want to dispute that depression is by definition pathological.

The ego with which we began filters away as love accumulates below.

That there are five sturdy red Gerber daisies in a jar on the table.

Centrifugal force circled the beasts until they swirled airborne.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

For the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air.

Raw, glistening—god’s design. Her newborn flesh-on-the-bone.

It’s a mistake to be here, he thinks, but he doesn’t turn around.

“I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room.”

She is a stalk, exhausted. She will surround these bones with flesh.

He held a screwdriver to the fleshy underside of Peggy’s neck.

Men veer into the earth and don’t come out. Silent choirs of canaries roost in a forest of chimneys.

In that instant, Niel lost one of the most beautiful things in his life.