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He had found my younger brother Brad there on the kitchen floor.

On this small island, everyone knows who comes, especially who goes.

You might say I acted on instinct. All I wanted was to stop the screaming.

Ahab went mad when he saw the sea is just the sea and nothing more.

I know what my promises are worth, know the worth of material things.

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.

Room painted off-white, so the death rattle can lean off the wall.

I ought to haul out this junk I called winter and lose it somewhere.

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

My cry for the first time fastened garlands of hope to the roof.

You remind me of lizards birthed in an outhouse by an ogre or a loon.

The girl I was could not have imagined the woman I grew up to become.

No one is dead, but you should come back. See what’s become of us.

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

Truth, it seems, spills from movies and sitcoms in the wires’ wake.

My sister’s fever wasn’t gone at all, but dazzling—suspended over us.

This is a place where young girls are butchered in old-time songs.

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

What was she thinking, driving alone to see a man she’d never met?

My body. Stop the air. Travel by stopping, full stop, just there.

Years after the Sisters of the Holy Names left you unlock the door.

The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.

We cling to an exact number of planets, to the Earth Our Mother.

She was thinking about what she would say when the time came.

Pulling the bird from his throat, how it’ll smell of bloodied oat.

No, you may not walk there. No, you may not stand on that. He is not here.

I thought that proved he blamed me. I thought they all did.

What better place to write the great American novel than North Africa?