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Jayne Anne Phillips

When he died earlier this year an enormous hole was left in my life.

The hut was cluttered with the skulls and bones of small animals.

I broke up fights, bandaged cuts, fielded calls from parents, and sat with the sad or depressed.

The rifle slams into my shoulder. Smoke pummels the air.

I don’t need to consult a healer to feel the aura glowing around us.

“Out to lunch,” she learns from an older colleague, is a euphemism.

The sedan clipped their front bumper and pitched Bill’s car into a slide.

I was never nonchalant. I was more intense than Kirk Douglas.

Mom often went to work on her days off. The library was her refuge.

The stories of terror continued well after the tsunami had passed.

Owen falls. Like a dummy. Like he’s dead even before he dies.

Eating a raw oyster is like exchanging a soul kiss with the sea.

We are everlasting. A friend is a friend is a friend in a string of lives.

The only stories we tell ourselves are the ones we need to survive.

My daughter swallows arrows of sunlight on her way to the grave.

Near to closing, he’d flop down in the chair to count his moldy money.

She was wanting to be noticed as a person not wanting to be noticed.

A branch breaks and the body lands the wrong way. Snapping is easy.

A pie can’t go to college, work hard for the grades, two jobs on the side.

The eyes of men were drawn, numb and automatic, to her youthfulness.

Chuck had a grin, but Mike kept his eyebrows raised, very curious.

I say aria, scale of the day, weigh each square foot she’s kept up.

The Renaissance mastered the illusion of depth on a flat plane.

In my eyes is the flame of the adolescent he wants to hire.

I wanted just to like chemistry, because my teacher hailed from Georgia.

Death is our common ancestor. It doesn’t care who we have dined with.

American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition.

Let us stifle under mud and affirm it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

Grandfather advised me: learn a trade. I learned to sit at a desk.