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The phone rang at an awkward hour, too late at night to be good news.

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

A grin of bitterness swept thereby like an ominous bird a-wing.

The grass is defiant, wild, and reluctant to take any shape.

I want these things to have another life, like the old garden behind our house.

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

Isn’t Nightshade sad, people said; isn’t he pathetic; isn’t he hideous.

Here’s the world, sweetheart. One word as small & large as a father.

I’ll leave a trail of crumbs as I descend into god knows where.

That summer we moved to the house you would die in years later.

It’s been months, and the fields are good for nothing but night talks.

Standing there in our small shadows, we discuss the ways of the dead.

For today, fuck it, it’s snowing, stay in. Eat your Wheaties dry.

At nineteen you were six-foot-two. At ninety-one you will be two-foot-six.

Nothing stills, nothing stops. The world is still as it was before.

It’s cruel to watch my edges crystallize and reflect light.

This is all there is. Nothing else. No heaven and no hell, okay?

Miriam slept at the ranch often, although little sleep happened there.

The Village wasn’t really a village. No walnut trees. Just cut flowers.

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

She’s not the same, her body more naked in its aging, its disorder.

my grandparents lay in a room listening to their legs rub together

Two animals, doe-eyed, slick across the road into the femur of the night.

She takes her shirt at the waist and pulls it up slowly: her hips, belly, bra.

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.

The longing to know hovered like a star above this child-woman.

Doctor Dressler left her a note: Suicide. Back by 7:00. Love, Max.

Everything rushes in. Everything that ever drove me crazy with dumb hope, every letdown.

Eros, myth, life, and literature in brilliant paintings by Lincoln Perry.

I light fires in the dark wake of space where you have tarried. Or died.