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The Misses Moses

Miss Moses smiled, I could take you, buster. Don’t try anything with me.

The Mustache

“I mean it, Martín. I won’t marry a man with a bald lip, like a boy.”

The N

Ron Carlson

The Nature of Nostalgia

Our visions of the world fade like the morning star, lost in the light of day.

The New Privacy

I ask if you are all right until you can be nothing but not all right, not okay.

The Niger Sings of Blood

I can’t hold a face held before dawn & not see behind the eyes bullets.

The Night I Watched My Twelve-Year-Old Brother Get Cuffed & Taken from Our Home, Tearing Up, Saying: “I Didn’t Do It!”

Of course he escaped. He would be the one. My legendary brother.

The Ninth Dream: War (in the City in Which I Live)

I have heard stories of the river, how people were willing to die to cross it.

The Novel

For two days I’ve been weeping over a nineteenth-century novel.

The Only Way Out Is Through

Derek was holding a gun. The barrel was pointed at his own temple.

The Orchid Casket and Other Poems

I forgot to detail that the jumper leapt from beside the hanging Monet.

The Order They Died In

It was a Saturday night in November when his diagnosis finally came.

The Outlaw

I bring out the emergency in people and I don’t know why.

The Palace of Illusions

I managed to talk sensible Alice into a little pink outfit and high heels.

The Panther

His weary glance has grown into a dazed and vacant stare.

The Paperboy

Just before four in the morning, the dog barks, the headlights appear.

The Part That Burns

Mafia didn’t like me, except for the tickling game. It went like this.

The Past Is the Present Only Colder

At night everything feels. Even a river feels its way through the woods.

The Pattern of the Scatter

She is eight years old and doesn’t recognize the word divorce.

The Perfect Couple

It had been four weeks and five days since she confronted him.

The Phone Rings

On her sixty-second birthday Marge Olson got a call, not a gift.

The Photographs of Your Life

I saw it on her face that day, a look like her heart would drift into the sky.

The Portrait of What Is Not There

The noiseless trees, the insentient breezes that are not there.

The Profundities and Other Poems

Stop her there, on the bank of knowingness, just before spring.

The Promised Land

She must know she was a mistake, what they call now a surprise.

The Red Studebaker

If your father were here, he wouldn’t put up with your insolence.

The Rembrandt

One felt all the poor lady’s barriers were falling save her manner.

The Rescue

By chance you saw. So much had become chance in your life.

The Resemblance of the Enzymes of Grasses to Those of Whales Is a Family Resemblance

This morning I watched two elephants dance the boogie-woogie.

The Right Fielder

Far below, the right fielder circles and stares, mitt raised to the sky.