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He got his wife off a German farmer, for whom he went to work one day.

Ira and Ada are stepsiblings. Within a month they were sleeping together.

Atomic bomb. How could those two words be said together?

Some days he thinks he has patients to see, meetings to attend.

Diane Kirsten Martin

Sometimes they revert to trickery, apple their venom with a smile.

Your face is a grain of rice, one small nothing on the world’s horizon.

shoulds & shouldn’ts unwound now to dids & didn’t

Why had she asked him to come along, someone she did not even know?

Mikey said the hole wouldn’t lead to China, but he was frequently wrong.

Their hands were acting as airfoils, producing lift, not drag.

I was constantly being torn between belief and disbelief in his narrative.

“Silence can be difficult, and we’re silent the whole time,” she said.

She had instinct for seeing what she could make happen.

A rifle, empty shells, the remains of a man, a bullet through his chest.

Every step I’ve taken has been from one tongue to another.

I wanted to tear away at the fabric of my pants, dig open my skin.

She holds the shirt to her face and inhales. With a start she pulls away.

I didn’t know I would be any good. But I knew I wanted to be a poet.

It wasn’t so long ago I carried my tiny son piggyback through the woods.

We are nothing; less than nothing, we are only what might have been.

A voice like my mother’s nail polish and my father’s lottery tickets.

Lately it’s getting harder to say the true thing, to find solace in nature.

“That pool,” Kenny said, breathing harder. “I’m telling you, it’s magic.”

You locate the green outline of the state your cousins are inside of now.

“Why, Ma? I don’t understand. I just don’t want you to be alone.”

Two softened reeds of rosemary pair, and spin in the white velouté.

She was laughing. Something animal in me was sparked, and I chased her.

O Fatima if only you would lean my way my heart would quiver.