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It seemed to her that they only ever touched each other in transient, sudden ways.

There lay before us a bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of gold.

One of us broke away, cooled, and died, having never fully lived.

“I can’t believe she’s drinking,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”

After you have read all you possibly can there may be a few lines left.

Dan Gerber reads poems of boyhood, and from the end of his mother’s life.

You were drowning in the bathtub. Mother was in her room.

The angel lay in his body effervescent as a flake of alabaster.

What’s left is a thumbhouse, an inch of gristle inside skin walls.

The coverage of the state funeral, black horse bearing an empty saddle.

A homecoming, she says, as if you hadn’t been back in decades.

The world seemed newly made and filled with a frightening silence.

When the population was whiter, they fawned over the Korean.

They retire for the night, he to his bedroom and she to hers. What of it?

Morie Johnson was successful. I am not a hooker. I am only a thief.

Some types of pain are just too deep to touch, are better left alone.

I drank every night until late and drew earth-shaking conclusions.

“No, no,” we say. “We’re fine! Really! We love things just the way they are!”

Today the game was to try to catch one of the cats in a pillowcase.

Here is where you touch the world and here are the words to feel its heat.

What I really meant to say is that I am tired. Beauty can demand so much.

The door opened, and Dan stormed in, shouting, “Motherfuckers!”

You couldn’t believe what the rhododendrons do around here.

Her mother is a locked door with another door behind it.

I was only five when Dad told me I had died. “You drowned,” he said.

All my life I wondered what it is to vanish like a ring of smoke.

Rain falls steadily, rattling down drainpipes and gurgling into gutters.

“Wanna give it a go?” my brother asks, nudging me with his 12-gauge.

Her husband is away at the family cabin, and she is glad for the space.

Mama would say beware of the little flaws that make one homely.