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“Hey, babe,” he said, breathing into the phone like a sex maniac.

I love you to distraction, she would say. I love you beyond love.

Summer’s erosion has begun, all that taking the waves from shore.

We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.

I try to get her to drink again. We were okay drunks, before Jesus.

The most arcane sexual practices could arouse me from my torpor.

He was living like a coyote, out on the margins. But then a letter came.

Her appearances are fleeting, a gust of air, a murmur in the night.

A six-word story written by eighth-grader Marlon Jiminez.

All my life, I’d been shy, and I wasn’t about to change that.

Barbra Nightingale

She was the idiot who fell in love with some high-class gigolo.

Since the accident she lost her hold on the world and never got it back.

She imagines his clothes on the floor, his arms wrapped around her waist.

The grass is always greener in the cemetery, was a joke I made to Jed.

I should look at what I’ve done. How loosely she let him come to me.

He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Drowning people will do anything for air.

Howie and Nadine were confident they’d be among the survivors.

Her will is resolute, and he knows enough not to challenge it.

I dream of watching my grandfather stagger home through the snow.

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

Your hands along her spine. Her hips unfolding like a cotton napkin.

He probably had an order. Ludes, Dexis, Black Birds—who knew.

The owl was a white that could not be compromised by any other color.

The clown has taken a seat at our veranda table in absolute silence.

I could shoot you and nobody would say boo. I’m within my rights.

Soledad is the name a woman is given, a sentence a woman must serve.

Try to make order in one direction, and things shoot off in another.

His thoughts swirl around him. Maybe women aren’t women anymore.

The sight of her belly ring and the smooth, tight canopy of flesh.