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Years ago I wanted parallel lives, to see how it turns out for all of me.

A child no bigger than small change calls from her window j’ai faim.

Marianne Boruch

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

Judith Harris

I want you enough to gnash you into a silence made from pieces of silver.

He says to his boots, “Well, suppose we went for fish.”

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

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

The old hen scratches then looks, scratches then looks. My life.

I bled. God didn’t want to hear about it. He said unclean and so it was.

I walked that land with him, one and mingling, breaking into breath.

This was his sky, his clouds rucked up over the fields. His country.

You’ve gathered more knowledge than you’d need for nine lives.

A ripple across the darker fathom, no sooner there than torn away.

He told me that he knows a parent’s grief for a dead child.

God is there between things, sitting at his own left hand.

Gail Godwin

I wish I could tell him he’s not going to hell. It would be so freeing for him.

I’d leave the house at night and walk the road, knowing I was watched.

He tried to regain that moment of grace, but there was no conjuring it.

What I want is a woman who knows all the meanings of indulgence.

I must be led by what was given to me as streams are led by it

Just give me a small joy, say, the size of a ketchup packet.

You are home in your bed like a soft animal with really intense feelers.

I thought how she must thrash with savage agility when she made love.

Somehow my confession became a sharp knife I kept hidden in a drawer.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself.

Come winter, they go to the funeral early & count the living.

Peering into the soap bubbles, she briefly imagined herself inside one.