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They felt smarter and sexier, especially when together.

He’s walking loopy, so I know he’s been had something besides beer.

Liz wore a brass wedding ring, and had no marriage certificate to show.

Ralph’s children had believed Christine was just after his money.

A woman from the next table eyed him and he eyed her right back.

Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.

The moon rescinds its blessing, rests its forehead on a crosier of ivory.

She was bad. A cool bad. All third-graders wanted bad like hers.

We drove, talking fast, fast, fast. He was always going for my zipper.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I’m always driving through the desert, on the interstate’s black river.

Idzia is a little monster. For a monster, though, she’s awfully cute.

Maybe that’s what she feels, not stranded, but suspended in time.

I had pasted a pink Post-it to my phone screen that said DON’T DRINK.

I never entered no-man’s-land by any light brighter than the palest moon.

To keep the baby safe, we sealed the house as if against bad weather.

The everlasting shines through in the threshold between worlds.

My soul’s parts know little and don’t care whether I live or die.

I looked up how much everything would cost. Giving birth: $9,000.

Language seems accomplice to grieving, everything dissolves.

I answered, blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings.

He was shirtless and showcasing a large tattoo of the Twin Towers.

“Your mother’s fine,” Giuseppe said. “We’re all completely fine.”

The summer Victor died, his dad spoke to no one but the canaries he kept.

Before April rings the chime, she forces her way up out of herself.

I became a symbol of freedom, a miracle who had escaped the Devil.

Third Place

The small, inadequate marks follow the outline, things left behind.

Dad doesn’t believe I’m beauty queen material. I believe in myself.