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Ann Beattie in a wonderful reading of her story “Find and Replace."

Suddenly Julia’s silence had solidified like cold fat in a frying pan.

You’d probably prefer to sneak back into me very still, swollen.

I know exactly what to do when Papa has a seizure in the middle of the night.

The jealous Othello, ready for murder, was transformed into a school-boy.

I’m alive, Sarah thinks, the slam of his look going all the way in.

The smell of death, once it gets inside your nose, is unmistakable.

The dugout boats kissing the shoreline have ferried us into open markets. Girl, you call me in time, where this too can be forgotten. The hands that made them asking for more things in dim light.

The social-media world was ablaze with his daughter’s bagunça.

I’m going to save up against the flood and stagger to carry nothing.

If every present
is possible, how can we have eyes to see?

I lie down and see you one bed over; therefore God exists.

i was a wild thing down by the river, quiet like wild things are.

Exhausted, androgynous, delirious, I delight in my many parts.

It is here I learn the speech of men. The speechless guilt of every swig.

Everything hung in perfect balance. Light and dark, heaven and hell.

Time is a hearse and horse, a carrot and stick, a window and widow.

I'll pick a black card of luck for you: star, pinkmoon, mirror, ostrich eye.

Maybe he was preparing for a disaster that would never happen.

he has come to write like nervous wasps in my mind like a grocery list.

Was he a good man or a bad man? Was it necessary, even, to speculate?

I must tell you what it is like to be human, or you will drift away.

Thank goodness Dad died—sounds awful but he left his condo paid for.

That late afternoon in the park, with its kiss, wasn’t an ending or a beginning; it was both. The piano had been a great bird rustling and swooping in the vast space.

A plus B; a child in peril, plus love, dissolution of, equals a story.

“You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Are you all right?”

I build our life together as I want it to be.

Regarding the affairs of our Father, your demon is Ennui.

Let’s rummage through each other’s bodies like a blowout sale.

I am veins and breath, the entrance the world passes through.