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Having held down the past applying pressure to its sacrum . . .

Some people are so beautiful, they belong everywhere they go.

I pictured you at Bagram Airfield in a metal coffin, quiet and still.

You didn’t speak, your eyes lobbed incendiary shells over the harbor.

They found her where such girls are found. A Manhattan street.

We were assigned straight to the lion’s muzzle, the Sardasht front.

I know what it means to be born in one life and meant for another.

Her wide and vicious mouth blossomed into a savage smile.

Any white man without a servant was presumed to be in need of help.

How do we bury
the dead stacking up against our picture window?

He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.

I was free. The first step had been taken, and it was irrevocable.

I want him to remember me hanging on his crosshairs.

It was an act that made me feel safer but also somehow more imperiled.

"In County": A new six-word story by Robert Olen Butler.

“Can’t you see Hemingway’s having breakfast with his grandson?”

Bad luck, like the white-scabs disease, can infect others.

Everyone roared at her wit. Ravenous children prowled like tigers.

A knife left by an untraced foot marks where to lay the body—fácil.

I roam the dirt with the law in my teeth, a widower in search of a widow.

He thought about kissing her. Then he decided that she was just lonely.

It is February in Ukraine. Juliana tells the reporter she just wants to live in her country.

May your wife remove her shirt and have an affair with a tornado.

Let those shadows sift the spirits of their children from the silt.

My wife fell in love with a dancer. A woman. I came here to get away.

They wrapped him in bandages from all three kits. The old man watched them.

“No one shoots when the army inoculates and hands out money.”

A friend said she hated the State of Israel because it killed her cat.

Barth looked after his students beyond anything expected of him.