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The stars begin to turn clockwise, freeing us of all consequences.

I dug a hole in you; I jumped (here is the church, here is the steeple).

Elsewhere, perhaps here too, regimes stagger, a congress ends.

It is here I learn the speech of men. The speechless guilt of every swig.

Imagine the world you want to live in; make the world in this image.

His flannel sleeve dangled into the flame. Pretty soon, I was on fire too.

Our father crumbled after her affair. We watched him for signs of cracking.

What right had Flora, of all people, to pronounce on what was strange?

In the school smock, I looked like an angel in search of her crèche.

Was he a good man or a bad man? Was it necessary, even, to speculate?

Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

Robert Hedin

How large our muscles have to be to lift our wings even a single time.

Through the dark, we say, through the dark: but do we ever really know?

The mechanism and its crank pull us forever closer, you and I.

Marianne Boruch

I’ve taken the pledge and made donations of blood to the world.

Judith Harris

Two bikers, the bartender, me, and a skinny girl in skintight blue jeans.

At night the voices on the patio sound like small darting birds.

You don’t know what it’s like to be so hungry that you’d steal to eat.

Her biggest secret was Jay Currie—her white American boyfriend.

Here, Min Jin reads from her novel at Narrative Night, New York City.

He says to his boots, “Well, suppose we went for fish.”

My father would have ended my clandestine career on the spot.

Let’s put a frog in his bed and have him feel it jump all over him.

The meeting hall of their bodies piled on lawns caked with dying birds.

This was his sky, his clouds rucked up over the fields. His country.

“You’re going somewhere now,” he said. “Up to the big smoke.”

It was our flesh with its deadly sweetness that led them on.