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His body so close I hear the cicada hum of his cells, and he slips away.

My son trims a curtain of lashes, immures them into a stray year.

A gravely ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant.

Better to rewrite Baudelaire: The body only exists in the dark.

How different they were; how comfortable he was that.

Alone but one year sober and my parole’s nearly done.

Ghosts are real. This much I know. It’s the living that give me trouble.

The hawk moves out of the way to let a little hot package of breath rise up.

I thought my body was mine until it became a map anyone could use.

We are in his car. “Bell, I’m starving. Want to go for a burger or pizza?” I panic. Pizza. 285 calories per slice. Burgers. Harder to estimate.

Royal baby George is tucked in the crook of his mother’s elbow.

She did not leave him for the sailor. So why should he be angry?

Is she dreaming of the rivers soft with codling in her hometown?

All over the planet people try to end pain: striptease, bee stings.

I grabbed him by the face and told him life only comes to a person once.

The allure of Mardi Gras is to feel this way: unseen and unseeable.

A father peeled the night / from another midnight & begged / me to lie

For me, Selweh was the real magic. She was nothing like my mother.

She is complaisant with all her clothes off. She moves to his touch.

Americans have always a kind of tenderness for cheat.

I have, in the long solitude of my body, asked for something else.

My bike, my skinny body, my pent breath was thrown to the grass.

We are going south where I know that my father is going to die.

The stones here carry the island’s low cry inside them. A landlocked grief.

The animals are dying. All the beautiful women are dying too.

I’ll see you on the sea, they say, but then they float past on a raft

He tuned the future backward as he left the ringing water to reclaim me.

I sit next to a man I never loved but let kiss me wetly for two months.

“I’m torturing you,” she said. “It isn’t fair.” Now I saw there were tears.

They taught us do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it?