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West Oakland was characterized by unemployment, poverty, and blight.

You never see Westerners, so you don’t think of them as human beings.

He didn’t mind, he insisted, that he loved her more than she loved him.

Owen’s head throbbed, his ears ached, and an anvil sat on his chest.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

She began to see the word, or traces of it, wherever she went.

He came into town with his big red pen and began revising us.

What’s the harm? Will you fight even the healing powers of love?

I waited and waited, rethinking first sentences in my sleep.

The time a man kissed my hand when we met. Though he’s been dead for decades now, I still feel the kiss.

You retell the story and I wait for my cues, when to smile, nod.

Love speaks in silence, on behalf of lovers too tired for words.

Her family was still poor and hungry and scared.

On a morning in November words appeared at the end of my pen.

Nothing likes to be abandoned, no one likes to be compared.

David Hinton

If life was exchanged, who is to say it flowed one way?

My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

The pen is mightier than the sword in the fretwork of a poet’s language.

For the president’s arrival they shot two dogs making love on the tarmac.

I wanted my love to be everywhere, then love began to bite through me.

Salt provokes, tenderizes. Your wounds, your dinner.

“Leaving for war, Hayes wept. He didn’t just cry; he wept...”

Is that coffee you have, or the hell of fusion in your cupped hands?

My lust works like the tides pulling in reverse, controlled by a simple ballast.

I have so many T-cells I’m afraid of forgetting their names.

Men are so delicate, must be given many portals. I try to be game.

You linger in the dimming aftermath, grayer and fainter than a breath.

Beyond her ampleness, he stands a small man vanquished.