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We backed up and I kept ripping it at his face, trying to knock his teeth out.

These are notes that please the great heart of man.

The blood had been soaked up in sawdust—“this is hell.”

I tell her I’m a woman now, that my boobs just popped in.

The sense of power that flights of temper evoke will betray you.

I am eleven years old and too young to die, but I am dying nonetheless.

I am eleven years old and too young to die, but I am dying nonetheless.

Your mother still glows with a smoothness that you envy.

Ron Carlson

Our visions of the world fade like the morning star, lost in the light of day.

I can’t hold a face held before dawn & not see behind the eyes bullets.

I hadn’t even tried. I was one of the few kids D.A.R.E. had worked on.

Of course he escaped. He would be the one. My legendary brother.

No fountains to quench the thirst between rounds of tag.

She is eight years old and doesn’t recognize the word divorce.

I saw it on her face that day, a look like her heart would drift into the sky.

Sometimes a story is like a beehive. Sometimes an idea is like a poem.

I thought fleetingly he might give it to me, as he knew I wanted it.

Stop her there, on the bank of knowingness, just before spring.

She must know she was a mistake, what they call now a surprise.

Years they sought her, whose crew left on the water a sad Welsh hymn.

If your father were here, he wouldn’t put up with your insolence.

The moment in your drunk when you become rich! A connoisseur.

By chance you saw. So much had become chance in your life.

He resumed his nightly practice of writing without being able to see.

We chose to stay in the brutality of that night, even as the girls walked away.

Ma didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.

I understood that for us there would be no mourning the shortstop.

This would not be a wooing meal. I was cooking my man into submission.

They’d been together an hour, but they were an easy threesome.