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46

I don’t want fiction. What I want is truth. Or someone’s version of it.

A Blessing

We watched our father chuck her boom box out the bedroom window.

A Dagger of Sunlight Lies across His Bed

He sits hiked up, naked to the waist, like a stone in the bedclothes.

A Dangerous Creature

The dog glares back at Roger, his eyes on fire, but he doesn’t let her go.

A Day at the Beach for Aphrodite

I was enraged at being alone on the outside of all that love and lust.

A Dream of Ease

I shoved them one by one, easy as pie yet with care, just shy of mercy.

A Father’s Story

Certainly the ushers who pass the baskets know me as a miser.

A Happy Birthday

I wanted to ride this day down into night, to smooth the unreadable page.

A Mirror of a Mirror

Have two children to keep around the house in case one goes missing.

A New Year’s Gift

He ended every year in this manner, writing and dreaming.

A Pandemonium of Want

Widow. I look up the etymology. To separate, split, cleave, divide.

A Partial History of Lost Causes

Chess was a humiliation that hung over him like a leper’s bell.

A Place for Us

Our house sits alone out in the country, seven miles north of town.

A Place of Our Own

Lorenzo and me, we’d squat our own building. It was the new frontier.

A Portion of Your Loveliness

My daughter’s favorite game is Holocaust. She’s quite inventive.

A Quiet Patchwork of Slats

Streetlights throw the blinds against the ceiling. It’s 7:00 p.m.

A Real Nice Baby and Other Poems

Royal baby George is tucked in the crook of his mother’s elbow.

A Sailor

She did not leave him for the sailor. So why should he be angry?

A Saint from Texas

So that’s what I’d look like if every beauty parlor in the world shut down.

A Secret Space

Two weeks after she and Mark were married, Hannah fell in love.

A Separate Set of Signs

Is she dreaming of the rivers soft with codling in her hometown?

A Sleigh Ride

Some inner voice told her that now or never her fate would be decided.

A Small Blip on an Eternal Timeline

I grabbed him by the face and told him life only comes to a person once.

A Soldier’s Lover

We never really had what might be considered a normal conversation.

A Son of Baghdad

For me, Selweh was the real magic. She was nothing like my mother.

A Spinster’s Tale

When he had passed from view, I stumbled back from the window.

A Storyteller’s Story

Americans have always a kind of tenderness for cheat.

A Summer in Between

In a way she enjoyed the slow, sad feeling of letting it go.

A Theory and Other Poems

I have, in the long solitude of my body, asked for something else.

A Trailer by the River

The thought of entertaining our relatives filled me with horror.