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

This summer I mothered my brother’s death; I brothered my mother’s cancer. My brother and mother died this summer, two of seven billion.

When I wasn’t teaching social studies, I basically lived on my balcony.

Son, do you know of shame? Then you must know that I cannot feel it.

I couldn’t make sense of the ruined house, the love stained to its creases. Sometimes life is a sequence of departures, sometimes a destruction.

Maybe all of it was possible. Maybe it all could work out.

Here they were, two surviving soldiers from opposite sides.

Long and black, almost thick, the night comes to drape my shoulders.

It was half the Spanish he knew—stop, I have a shotgun.

Turned out Bauer was one of the ones brought alive by misery.

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

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

My children, children, remember to let me go, delete my number.

In Ovid’s tale, the virgin Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law.

I grip the handlebar and pin my eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable crash.

From the roof, my husband observed daily a man and a woman having sex.

She pulls quickly on her cigarette and blows it at me through the phone.

Three lives I flicked alight with a few match scrapes. I cupped them.

A woman pushing a walker understands—gravel can be pain.

“I have always had a gift of feeling what is in other people’s hearts.”

What my father and I destroyed, I take back—kneeling, among the shells.

I’m still in love with this filthy city, but now I know Berlin's love isn’t free.

No one answered. I turned to his parents. My stomach felt on fire.

We didn’t give the order to drop the bomb. But thank God somebody did.

For the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air.

It was good they were Africans, she thought. It meant less danger.

Sue Williams tells a pitch-perfect story outloud, about devotion.

Gramps’ will was a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets.

I was getting a little fogged, but I recognized irony when I heard it.