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My wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.

Cruelty is cruelty and you don’t ask why, you just hit first and hit hard.

I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife.

She rocks quickly from side to side, proud, lifting herself higher.

My hands only knew. The painkillers in our mothers’ cabinets.

Susan Ann so wants to be that girl—daring, free, divinely sensual.

We didn’t think of ourselves as anything so grand as sex workers.

Love is not something you wait for passively, but a practice.

Love’s not all that fun, but it saves you. And you should be saved.

I simply wrapped my arms around Maxey and held on for dear life.

It suddenly seemed to her that the world was filled with little miracles. There were moments when love overcame her despair.

My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me.

The graffiti suggests the most essential story of New Haven.

A finger on the bell, a quick sprint on light feet, and then stifled laughter.

Anchored off Biscayne Bay my father’s wooden skiff swings easy.

Dad was blind until six months ago, when he bumped his head in the fire.

Even then (Colin remembers now), it felt like the end of something.

i stored away in my mama’s empty perfume bottles smells and stories

These old guitar players were the last pure thing this country produced.

I’d make a tub of mud to keep live crabs. I’d refill it daily.

When an old man marries a young piece of flesh, she is the ruler.

He is too young even to be drinking let alone educating us.

She unhooks the sapphire pendant from its stand. Slips it into her pocket.

You could take your pick from an array of rebellions to consider.

Fearing for them, I clustered them together, then cut them off.

She wants something red and shiny that always works.

It’s way past 10 p.m. and we have no idea where our child is.

He was reading Our Town. She studied the departure board.