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In time the squirrel who was my friend is my friend no longer.

Our remarks must be tempered by a sense of cooperation.

They danced only with one another and did not speak to white boys.

You don’t feel anything when they cut you, not at first, just the blood.

“I can’t hold it any longer. I have to pee,” I finally confessed to Viola.

They caught those few of us left unclaimed by the one emotion, or the other.

There’s being young and growing old, being here and being gone.

The students usually didn’t look up to see who was serving them.

The goose cannot see the North but knows exactly where it lies.

When I cried the tears felt so ineffective next to the ocean.

More and more whiskey was required to knock out the elephant.

In search of the life we all agree is so desirable—art, romance, freedom!

Joanna Walsh

“Go watch the showgirls, Roy,” said Chino. “It’s educational.”

I told kids I didn’t feel a thing there anymore, but it was a lie.

“Rev. MacLean’s been stabbed in Oban,” his wife said, her voice thin.

What was he, twenty, no, twenty-two years younger than me.

We had a pact to live outside the adult world forever, and we broke it.

Over salad, the Frenchman asked me about work and what I did.

I cared less about the potential payoff than I did about being right.

“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have done it, but they had it coming.”

The dean’s voice was stuck in my head. Plagiarism. Expulsion.

Loved this little portal to my past so much that I went looking for others.

Tirelessly her arm rose and fell, till the child at last fell at her feet.

That autumn, my first in San Francisco, I ran short of money.

Sitting beside a heap of steaming dung I felt in great poetic form.

On that still, snowy day, Mick’s neck popped like a flaming log.

It’s all good,” Mila says, meaning, it’s so not, her voice glass-like.

I have three girls from my previous marriages, but she beats them all.