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War & ViolenceI’m afraid to say anything or nothing, I’m white & unalterably broken.
By the time I looked over my shoulder, the sun had already fallen.
A story about what changes and what remains the same, in just six words.
The horse had been beaten and flies crawled on the beat marks.
The distant past returned—what part of it, he could not decide.
History howls for direction so I remind him how the hero was lost.
We take our solace, in a time of malaise and mourning, in the close-at-hand.
Frank kept his face blank as he read the orders: Report to Berlin.
Neither blood nor belonging accounted for my presence in Ghana.
Felicia knew why he was there. He was waiting. Waiting for her.
I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. It’s not a good song.
Chess was a humiliation that hung over him like a leper’s bell.
We never really had what might be considered a normal conversation.
Americans have always a kind of tenderness for cheat.
The guards ripped off Mara’s clothes, pinning her head against the wall.
The stones here carry the island’s low cry inside them. A landlocked grief.
Crows rasp from branches, scatter debris across unfinished plots.
He said he had come back to the prison because it was home.
The author reflects on a soldier‘s experience, in just six words.
The towns died as quickly as a single house, a house like ours, lit gold within.
We’ve seen the news. We know the story. How even our bodies hurt us.
Why did it take Steven’s small coffin to get me to see my own son?
Devanand Simon was twenty-five when the bodies fell from the sky.
The old man drinks some more liquor and whacks down two trees.
“Elohim, we lasted through all the shit of training, and now it’s over.”
Alva knows the storm is coming. The ground is falling away.
Waiting for a cure, waiting for the closeout sale, the black sail.
The first time I met you I fought your father in the driveway.
‘Isn’t this great?’ she said. ‘A bit of peace for ourselves?’ ‘No one could go into a cafe on their own on Christmas Day.’
There was a glint of cold red light out there, on the other shore of the lake.