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

How smooth their bones, like alabaster shaved from moonlight.

What’s a man supposed to do when his best friend is a falcon?

Never issue a dare to a dead person. They’ve got all the time in the world.

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

This would not be a wooing meal. I was cooking my man into submission.

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

Her bra is black, her breasts full and white. There is too much flesh.

The local madman’s been here even longer, lying across the sidewalk. It’s no sin, all who hurry past his babble: no word-salad unlocks God.

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.

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

Some people see the man but not the light, the field but not the varnish.

West Oakland was characterized by unemployment, poverty, and blight.

Spanish men. They whispered and whistled. It made her jumpy.

Say what you will, a human being has the right to their own body.

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

I waited and waited, rethinking first sentences in my sleep.

Fatwas condoned our arrest for the rouged contours of our lips.

Euclid stands in front of his lover’s door, open to the last hours of light.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

The moon it is red, and the stars are fled but all the sky is a-burning.

The cat was looking at me with an intelligent expression. It knew.

I could go in for some pie why the hell not, there’s so little time.

Sixty-year-old veins look like giant roots breaking through earth’s skin.

She looks down the street for Scott’s truck. He’s late but so is she.

I’m recalling his socks, the inked initials, the splashes of blood.

“Who is it?” Irina asked at the door. “Open up,” a voice commanded.