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James Salter

Better to be a bird without altitude. Or to get out of the game early.

I was once a rider of mastodons, a waitress showing skin.

Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash.

The Poet Laureate reads three poems in his New Hampshire home.

Words appear like the answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked.

I eat what’s in front of me, as all great men do. Some wouldn’t, but I do.

A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. It’s a little like cheating.

All down my street the new fathers beat the kingness out of the kings.

She holds her smile like a note sustained at the end of a phrase.

She does not know within a decade she will unload a slug into her mouth.

A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. It’s a little like cheating.

All day we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep gold of your thighs.

A woman’s long bare legs stretched up at the edge of the graveyard.

All I know is not in front of me, my sweet angels.

If it were fiction, calling the place Newtown would be too much.

The rhythm and sound is in there to start, and it seems to lead the way.

Tobias Wolff

I was a stranger to most people, myself incriminated.

Carol Edgarian

He finds the note taped to the lid of the toilet: “There’s someone else.”

When I went to Scotland for a wedding, I didn't plan on firing a gun.

Real ones get through again and again.

I ask that now I be allowed to see the one my vision has been denied.

That day he stood on some threshold and paused and wept at his choice.

Sue Williams tells a pitch-perfect story outloud, about devotion.

When I meet his gaze, he’s frowning, a hint of anger flashing in his eyes. When saw the fury in his eyes, I thought he was going to kill him.

Lust was just a frenzy of activity that had mostly led Benny in circles.