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Howie and Nadine were confident they’d be among the survivors.

My ups and downs never stop on the hump we call a hill behind the house.

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.

I think you’re carrying on to get your brothers in trouble.

A Midwestern man is never without his knife. Half of us carry guns.

I could shoot you and nobody would say boo. I’m within my rights.

They know whoever passes on the curving road just by the footstep.

My father left me in the car while he was grabbing one for the road.

For eight weeks no one heard my voice for eight weeks no one slept.

After four years of watching his body implode, we’re terrified.

Collage what we can, form fractured and repaired, blend of is and isn’t.

Oklahoma, a state shaped like a pot, probably some gruel inside.

You remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.

Our fathers sit in their gear looking as mean as we knew them to be.

“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.

Truth, it seems, spills from movies and sitcoms in the wires’ wake.

My sister’s fever wasn’t gone at all, but dazzling—suspended over us.

This is a place where young girls are butchered in old-time songs.

All my life I have noted that my thinking was atavistic, totemic.

I stuff cotton in my ears, bits of bird’s nest, anything to stop all that talk.

Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.

The horror of the waste appalls me. This beauty. This habitation of dream.

Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and her husband.

For the first two months of class, Toby did barely any writing at all.

The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.

If it were me, kid, I’d swallow. You bet I would. But first I’d run like hell.

No, you may not walk there. No, you may not stand on that. He is not here.

The linebacker grins, but the lines around his eyes tighten.

The fires in the hills signify nothing more than their own wonder.