Explore

Welcome, little citizen. Lend me your presence, and I’ll lend you mine.

His eyes, dark brown and unwavering as he delivered the details.

I felt that Teddy occupied a range below acceptability, even among boys.

She closed her mind to all familiar shapes and strained back.

I began to look for evidence of my father’s duplicity in his body.

Their breath rose in small clouds. Their flag rippled above them.

It wasn’t me he was aiming at; he was using me to make my mom unhappy.

“We know what can happen,” Mike says. “We choose to do this.”

They felt smarter and sexier, especially when together.

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

The orderlies see him in the mirror and mistake it for his twin.

Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.

She stopped, turned toward him, placed her hand on his chest.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

Their leader is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others.

Maybe that’s what she feels, not stranded, but suspended in time.

In the Nablus apartment she remembers rolling hills of citrus.

I never entered no-man’s-land by any light brighter than the palest moon.

Sex can be revelatory. Essential nature emerges in sex.

There are certain defects which well mounted glitter like virtue itself.

I answered, blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings.

He was shirtless and showcasing a large tattoo of the Twin Towers.

We could hear the parade three blocks before it arrived at our corner.

The current looked cold and brown. It would freeze soon—November.

Mentors can suggest to you what more you are capable of.

Before sunrise I counted nine meteors scratching the heavens.

Sit beside me. Old country, I am hopeful and troubadour.

I became a symbol of freedom, a miracle who had escaped the Devil.

The small, inadequate marks follow the outline, things left behind.