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On this small island, everyone knows who comes, especially who goes.

Mr. Holt had grown old since Beverly last saw him. He looked weary.

Ahab went mad when he saw the sea is just the sea and nothing more.

Beached on the kingdom I learned to swim with my eyes closed.

As a girl I was raised to sing along with the rest. To praise. Especially men.

He grabbed me, groped for my hips, kissing me, smelling my hair.

The wind was like a girl sobbing out her story of betrayal to the stars.

Maybe all of it was possible. Maybe it all could work out.

Maybe this was one thing in his life he had done right, or so he hoped.

Here they were, two surviving soldiers from opposite sides.

We left our lives behind us as fast as the Beemer’s zero to sixty.

Long and black, almost thick, the night comes to drape my shoulders.

Weird that yellow’s the color of cowardice when the sun never runs.

It was half the Spanish he knew—stop, I have a shotgun.

This is a place where young girls are butchered in old-time songs.

People talk this way who would prefer the earth parceled out in standard lots.

What was she thinking, driving alone to see a man she’d never met?

I stuff cotton in my ears, bits of bird’s nest, anything to stop all that talk.

Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.

Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and her husband.

My body. Stop the air. Travel by stopping, full stop, just there.

Years after the Sisters of the Holy Names left you unlock the door.

Cassandra blared Puccini and Eminem so she would not pray.

There was a fish. And then there was the consciousness of robots.

The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.

She was thinking about what she would say when the time came.

“Aren’t you full of surprises,” Talinda would have said. If she had known.

What better place to write the great American novel than North Africa?

She pulls quickly on her cigarette and blows it at me through the phone.