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Your mother still glows with a smoothness that you envy.

He whispers words that sound as miraculous as the skinned fish of the clouds my father writhed like pentecostal snakes while he drove drunk

She accused her husband with great drama of having destroyed her life.

This storm scares me. A foreign climate occupies the land.

Of course he escaped. He would be the one. My legendary brother.

He only told the world what the world wanted to hear from a guy who graduated from Harvard.

No fountains to quench the thirst between rounds of tag.

Sneaking was one thing, entering a bar with a someone else’s ID another.

Part of me wished I’d never tried heroin. The rest wanted to be high.

Mafia didn’t like me, except for the tickling game. It went like this.

He’ll probably try to get her in the sack, just to stay in practice.

Every dawn you’d toss the feed, your hands faithful to the good work of rising.

I had to prepare. I had to be able to save us from what was coming.

If your father were here, he wouldn’t put up with your insolence.

The moment in your drunk when you become rich! A connoisseur.

“For the entire time I was there I couldn’t get that out of my head.”

In the rooms you picked up what you liked, like shells on a beach.

We chose to stay in the brutality of that night, even as the girls walked away.

The first time the world demanded more of me, I was twenty-nine.

It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success in the West.

Ma didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.

Love cannot override what cells do in the nighttime of our bodies.

I hold on to the shape of a star the way my aunts hold on to Jesus’s gown.

After nearly a year of dating, I never stopped thinking of that other boy.

He was warm that way, always tender, and maybe that’s the worst part.

He glowered even as a little child. Maybe because he has your bad eyes.

He was trying to seduce me with his history, which was mine as well.

Surely a million mothers and school teachers can’t be entirely wrong.

Never mind the gossip of the world. Don’t have it, yet have it!

She wonders if he will be all right. She assumes he has four-wheel drive.