Stories

I feel as if I have been struck from the book of the living.

I think there was a center about which I never even thought to ask.

My childhood is a city where tenderness was frowned upon.

Why do you keep so much from your husband, don’t you trust him?

That year, the mail would arrive as white as warning, as flashing teeth.

The sloshed grownups had little to say to me. I loved it that I was alien.

Voices chanted Allah’s call to worship, 3:30 a.m. in Palestine.

Splayed toes adhesive on a whitewashed wall, ghost-tattoo.

Her mother always complained Sara was different after a night at Judy’s.

I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you’re really alive.

I wish I could tell him he’s not going to hell. It would be so freeing for him.

Imagine being able to calm the one you love best, who loves you best.

It’s the human genius of reproducing not quite exactly.

It was a horrible place because it wasn’t exactly horrible.

Our girls are the slow, sickly, fast, and troublemaking ones.

I’d leave the house at night and walk the road, knowing I was watched.

It has its life, returning always to the ocean. It doesn’t care.

I am trying not to want to want to. Trying not to doing wall sits in the poetry room.

He tried to regain that moment of grace, but there was no conjuring it.

Any good river should be fat, any good ocean should be worth meeting. A child won a hundred dollars by taking it from the tail of a muddy calf. I remember Robinhood too, but that feels like a different thing.

No matter how much money there is, it can always just drain away.

What I want is a woman who knows all the meanings of indulgence.

His voice was wrung with panic as he spit curses like spoiled milk.

A clumsy coyote descends an old hill of garbage. Death is visiting.

I loved the game not for its shapes alone, but for symmetry’s quiet flash.

I was a son again until my parents died. Even then, I felt like myself.

I must be led by what was given to me as streams are led by it

Perhaps the only way to see a whole body is to see one coming out of you.