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I was once very brave. Once I was very brave. I was very brave once.

Three lives I flicked alight with a few match scrapes. I cupped them.

It was a Tuesday, so they made love. She thought it was a fair compromise.

Sometimes the phone would ring and ring, and I’d go answer. It was him.

What my father and I destroyed, I take back—kneeling, among the shells.

A dwarf is now crying, he sounds swollen but golden with malediction.

No one answered. I turned to his parents. My stomach felt on fire.

For the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air.

There is a baby in the square, plumped down on Papa’s thigh.

It comes as no surprise that everything is flying toward one point.

It’s a mistake to be here, he thinks, but he doesn’t turn around.

Sue Williams tells a pitch-perfect story outloud, about devotion.

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

When I meet his gaze, he’s frowning, a hint of anger flashing in his eyes. When saw the fury in his eyes, I thought he was going to kill him.

We were hurtling close to a hundred miles an hour through the dark.

“Look down,” I said, comb in hand. “Let me check behind your ears.”

I was getting a little fogged, but I recognized irony when I heard it.

All we knew from my father was that my sister had to be cut from her car.

In that instant, Niel lost one of the most beautiful things in his life.

He was staring at his car like you might a stare at a dog.

I am drawn to these victims because I was there the night they were killed.

Black wings thrash in trees, then strafe me low, my head their devil.

I felt that this maternal oblivion could be the rest of my life.

Meghan Dunn

It was as if my dead husband was flowing within me now, like blood.

The underworld reached out for your hand and found payment.

“I can’t die, I don’t want to die, I love life,” Prince Andrei thought.

In the truck’s bed, resting where a dog’s might—the dead deer’s head.

You don’t feel anything when they cut you, not at first, just the blood.

I can’t see a way out of this. Things will not necessarily get better.