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She could not remember what Past and Present stood for.

“For the entire time I was there I couldn’t get that out of my head.”

He was last in Calcutta more than fifteen years ago, for his mother’s funeral. Han Ru feels something vaguely discomfiting, followed by a surge of recognition.

Far below, the right fielder circles and stares, mitt raised to the sky.

If you want to know what to write, ask yourself what obsesses you.

In the rooms you picked up what you liked, like shells on a beach.

We chose to stay in the brutality of that night, even as the girls walked away.

It almost makes you cry, to know that you are no longer needed.

Ma didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.

I understood that for us there would be no mourning the shortstop.

What humanity needed was that gravity-defying miracle, the bird.

The past, you hear it, the small hours, sucked down the undertow.

I have studied and become intimate with the speed of darkness.

Outside of Ikea’s window the nighttime wind tilts like a folk song.

“As your brother, I ask you, how did you get that scar on your face?”

He was trying to seduce me with his history, which was mine as well.

For a month after 9/11 Bella wept through all her appointments.

I thought it was beauty alone that gave significance to life.

If you let me live, I will buy you beer whenever I see you in town.

No parent has yet been born who can save a child from childhood.

Strange then, strange now, that language wants to be alone with me.

Men like me and my brothers filmed what we planted for proof we existed.

Her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.

Little footage, this plot, where it thrived at first, then ghosted away.

When the snake attacked the soldier, its fangs left a violent opening.

When I think on it, I can’t believe I’m going to kill two people over weed.

We spread. Kneel. We’ll come out missing parts. This we know.

One said she heard the jazz-band sob when the little dawn was grey.

We’d hit something in the dark which—bang!—was there and gone.

In the backyard I submerge myself in a bathtub of soil, soak with the hose.