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What I want is a woman who knows all the meanings of indulgence.

What right does an American mutt like me have to depict in fiction the lives of a Salvadoran family?

Just give me a small joy, say, the size of a ketchup packet.

My days pass through me as music through a thin, stretched wire.

Her knees seemed about to give way, and he quickly grabbed her elbow.

You are home in your bed like a soft animal with really intense feelers.

Walking on Canal Street, I slipped on the curb and fell on my face.

All of those feelings—you do not have them, they have you.

The year we left the reservation a white boy gave me a trash bag.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself.

Rules are rules. No one comes this close, this fast. Protocol reigns.

I’ve got other plans. And they don’t center on ringnecks.

His chest was sweaty and his T-shirt stuck to it, bleeding black.

We were assigned straight to the lion’s muzzle, the Sardasht front.

I walk over to her for what seems to be an eternity. “May I have this dance?”

What is greater: the distance between these bodies, or their need?

He calmed the animal with song while loosening the slipknot.

When the thugs from the bank showed, up my father laughed.

He begins to realize that the impossible event may well be about to occur.

Claim to be Choctaw or Cherokee. Claim to be a princess too.

You are the only one who knows not to pour water on the flame.

He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.

It had always been this way. Mothering, for my mother, was a cameo role.

I was free. The first step had been taken, and it was irrevocable.

May your wife remove her shirt and have an affair with a tornado.

All her sisters have gone to bed, dreaming dreams not like the wakeful.

At nineteen I lived for three months as an earnest cocaine addict.

Whitman may just mean: it is pretty cold, but there’s always colder.

I’ve wavered in confidence, but never on whether I was going to write.