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Then a darker realization shook him: he’d left Jason at the bottom of the steps, alone.

He grabbed me, groped for my hips, kissing me, smelling my hair.

Her skin was bruised under her eyes, purple like the swollen toe.

Maybe this was one thing in his life he had done right, or so he hoped.

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

“Mind you come straight home,” Mrs. Heywood always says.

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.

Screaming, the children flew toward the trees in their saucers.

I stuff cotton in my ears, bits of bird’s nest, anything to stop all that talk.

Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.

Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and her husband.

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

Jo had tossed every last wedding photo, wanted no recollection.

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

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

In Ovid’s tale, the virgin Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law.

From the roof, my husband observed daily a man and a woman having sex.

The fires in the hills signify nothing more than their own wonder.

I hope you weren’t reverse-bookmarking everyone.

The snow on the windshield a tunnel of wings my friend is driving through.

That there are five sturdy red Gerber daisies in a jar on the table.

My father was at an awful disadvantage in a sport where cunning is a virtue.

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

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

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

Gramps’ will was a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets.

She is a stalk, exhausted. She will surround these bones with flesh.