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In hushed awe they talk of things to come, a golden time of flowering.

I'll pick a black card of luck for you: star, pinkmoon, mirror, ostrich eye.

Elsewhere, perhaps here too, regimes stagger, a congress ends.

he has come to write like nervous wasps in my mind like a grocery list.

What right had Flora, of all people, to pronounce on what was strange?

In the school smock, I looked like an angel in search of her crèche.

Was he a good man or a bad man? Was it necessary, even, to speculate?

“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”

She’ll grow into a beauty, but she needn’t contend with that yet.

I saw the glowing body, silver with time, emerge from behind a lone pine.

Who are we? Without one another, who will we be?

There’s nowhere he can kiss where she hasn’t been kissed by the sun.

Two bikers, the bartender, me, and a skinny girl in skintight blue jeans.

Michael McGriff

At night the voices on the patio sound like small darting birds.

Let’s rummage through each other’s bodies like a blowout sale.

They plant whispers where shouts incinerate into hisses.

Through the dark, we say, through the dark: but do we ever really know?

Her biggest secret was Jay Currie—her white American boyfriend.

Here, Min Jin reads from her novel at Narrative Night, New York City.

You don’t know what it’s like to be so hungry that you’d steal to eat.

My father would have ended my clandestine career on the spot.

She bequeathed her children a mother who dreams and smiles.

Like lions in cages, women like me dream . . . of freedom . . .

We crossed the length of Iran to reach a lake so big they called it a sea.

The meeting hall of their bodies piled on lawns caked with dying birds.

Don’t try to find me by spit, by genetic sleuthing, by Are you my?

You try to confess your crime of turning the world into words.

Play hero, sunburned protagonist, awake in our dream.

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