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Before sunrise I counted nine meteors scratching the heavens.

Sundays, your wife at Mass, we locked ourselves in my room.

Third Place

The small, inadequate marks follow the outline, things left behind.

Mistaking water hemlock for parsley, I die hours later in the hospital.

I’m guilty—locating my gratitude against someone else’s suffering.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

I had that feeling of being young again, immortal, wearing a magic war shirt.

Mild nights would have us out of doors—at their opening I am rapt.

I have a maple in the yard and from time to time all is distant.

Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.

With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?

She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.

The truth has always been thus and the response the same.

It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.

How bright and eager they appear, how ready to get started.

Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.

Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.

It doesn’t matter who he is. I don’t think about him much anymore.

Sherman Alexie

Heaven preserve me from the Epidemic of a Proud Ignorance!

The horse is in the air, her legs withdrawn, a diamond shape.

I believe you get to see a sunset once. Death, well, I’ve lost count.

Grant had a lot of buttons on that coat—when he wore it.

What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?

Someday you’ll understand, darling. Everyone will just—vanish!

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

On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain dissolves like a Eucharist wafer.