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A gravely ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant.

He sits hiked up, naked to the waist, like a stone in the bedclothes.

It’s so delicate, the light. And there’s so little of it. The dark is huge.

He ended every year in this manner, writing and dreaming.

Some inner voice told her that now or never her fate would be decided.

She is very rich. She will leave me everything when she dies, he says.

After breakfast I set out to see what my wild neighbors have been up to.

When he was a child, my father had a cousin who was buried by a plow.

The animals are dying. All the beautiful women are dying too.

You walk and the world bends toward you like leaves waiting for rain.

Snows piling in his crying mouth. Cold gave him a light complexion.

When I dream of lovers, I rarely see faces. It’s better if we never touch.

Your image is on my credit card, you and the old red, white, and blue.

Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land.

Nobody knows where I am, Ned thought. No one in the whole world.

I fell asleep wondering to whom the tree might have been writing.

I opened my pocketknife, grabbed his hair in a fistful, and cut.

Jimmy’s jacket, mittens, and shirt were in a pile next to his frozen body.

It was like a scene in a movie; it didn’t seem real. The man kicked her.

People only see that side of him. He is still a boy, learning to be a man.

Eszter Marosszeky and David Matheson

Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.

Frail as a breath, it broke at once, leaving a tiny kiss in my fingers.

It’s been months since the cat died and still we find her hair.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know my father’s grief.

The streets were filled with couples and families on their way home.

They say it is the soul that rises, not the body. But the body does rise—

Two softened reeds of rosemary pair, and spin in the white velouté.

Anne Marie Rooney

He took off his clothes and left them on the living room floor.