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I dug a hole in you; I jumped (here is the church, here is the steeple).

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

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

There was only the gulf of our steps, our breathing brittle as string.

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

The pupils are toothpicks. The lake is a sky with a circle beneath.

What right had Flora, of all people, to pronounce on what was strange?

In the school smock, I looked like an angel in search of her crèche.

When he bent close to her, his balaclava glowed silvery in the dying sunlight.

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.

Her last relationship was with Elsa’s Instagram, truth be told. If Elsa is going to accept her follower invite, it needs to look believable. You did a bad thing, she thinks, and this is what you get.

Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

Absence rarely makes the heart grow fonder, or so my mother said.

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.

Suddenly two would dart and clasp one another belly to belly.

After my father passed away, I’d go back to stare at the cave paintings.

Two bikers, the bartender, me, and a skinny girl in skintight blue jeans.

Michael McGriff

I’ve taken the pledge and made donations of blood to the world.

They plant whispers where shouts incinerate into hisses.

This is the stupid math of loving another human being.

Who are we? Without one another, who will we be?

Imagine octopus, and keep the talk going through the chew.

What excuse did I use to pick a fight with that arrogant poet?

A child no bigger than small change calls from her window j’ai faim.

At Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau clicks like on the “Wilderness” page.

My father would have ended my clandestine career on the spot.

Like lions in cages, women like me dream . . . of freedom . . .

She bequeathed her children a mother who dreams and smiles.