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I hear Tchaikovsky when I close my eyes and pretend I’m flying.

A wildness and all the ways I could never be classy enough for pearls.

Brassy bullets fell against the floral comforter like little candies.

Well, back home has really changed, you won’t get that same bammy.

Tomorrow I’ll be ratted out about the hunting, but I knew it’d be worth it.

“Look in my eyes. Do I look like someone who has heard this story?”

1908. The puppet’s name is Sambo. Oh what a friendly boy he looks to be!

The alert says Warning: Wild Exotic Animals Loose.

The new generation doesn’t play war, which is a shame; they text.

Like a bird with a broken wing I will smudge the line of the hopscotch.

Sometimes in sunlight the scar shines, skin smooth and tight.

The sun falls back and vanishes like the men in my family who’ve died.

Peter Taylor’s stories are jigsaw puzzles of nuance and suggestion.

The road is covered with lake water that reaches Gloria’s calves.

A family altar stuffed with dead family hanging now above the TV.

I’m touched by kindness, I declare. That anyone wants me is a miracle.

You have to be three times better than the white kids, at everything.

I saw myself, and for the first time, I didn’t look away.

The sex in these fantasies was always a product of love.

Snow on blue roof tiles—sleeping village awakened by waves.

He’d reenlisted in ’64; he would not go home until the War was won.

Welcome, the place seemed to say, let’s screw with you a little more.

We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.

The only person I’d seen naked was my mother the night she died.

I remember a child’s fingers on his wrist as they traced the blue.

Like a god I shook their tiny worlds, terrible but ineffectual storms.

She was the idiot who fell in love with some high-class gigolo.

Since the accident she lost her hold on the world and never got it back.

Grandma was forced to break her vow of silence only three times.

They come to America and their child is shot down like a wild animal.