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Heartache & Lossexpand_moreAnything can happen because everything happens in New York.
Louise Farmer Smith
Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.
Mild nights would have us out of doors—at their opening I am rapt.
Cheer and cheer and cheer she sings a song on nesting wings.
With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?
As our friendship declined into torture, the prairie grew hotter.
His shirt, he realized, was completely soaked, and he could actually see his heart rippling beneath the cotton.
She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.
The dead men don’t look like themselves or anybody else.
It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.
Ms. Marmelstein led with her eyelashes, curling out like scimitars.
Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.
Sherman Alexie
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
These days I watch the world go by and do not breathe life into it.
Grant had a lot of buttons on that coat—when he wore it.
In all the faded retellings of that night, there’s a lot he left out.
Then came “the sea of trouble” as he crumpled his bank statement.
Cruelty is cruelty and you don’t ask why, you just hit first and hit hard.
What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?
Someday you’ll understand, darling. Everyone will just—vanish!
On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain dissolves like a Eucharist wafer.
I sensed that a name defined who I was and would be in the future.
It suddenly seemed to her that the world was filled with little miracles. There were moments when love overcame her despair.
The phone rang at an awkward hour, too late at night to be good news.
The notes must be crying inside me falling from their proper octaves.
A grin of bitterness swept thereby like an ominous bird a-wing.
Ten years ago, when I was in college, my father divorced my mother and said he wanted me to become responsible for her. That is why I fled to Italy.
