They gave me a pencil and a single sheet of paper and they told me to write slowly and clearly, so that I wouldn’t miss a thing. I looked first at the angular man with the protruding chin standing above me and then the round dark-haired woman who stood slightly behind him. I thought it odd that they were the same height and their skin the same color: a lifeless, milky pink. Their faces blended together to make one misshapen head. One of them smelled like potatoes, though it may have been both of them. It made my temples throb.

A SHIVER pricks his spine. It is a soft tingle, just enough to rouse him from the depths. Face down in a pool of drivel, the young lothario is unsure of his place in the world. This reluctance is palpable as he drinks in the blackness like a homemade amer, slowly swishing the gloom this way and that across his tongue to best capture its flavor. The acrid tone confirms his suspicions — here is a realm detached from the sovereignty of his dreams. Not Eden, but Gethsemane, where dangers are many and miracles few.

You answered my rhetorical questions. A search for certainty that Thieved my rhetoric Replaced it with yes and no’s You turned my world binary Made my epiphany quotidian: A tropical disease that Denies the feverish Rush of frenzied surprise.

Cannot dream but if possibility were possible, you’ll find that men exist elsewhere, too, but that’s in the preterite. Impossible to do anything except for what is happening now.

When she was a young girl she was beguiled by the trappings, the manners, the elocution of a mighty vocabulary. She would listen for the rich tones delivered by tongues that were born and raised in upper crust high rise apartments ruling over lake Michigan. Knew how to follow the money, how to modulate words, the subtleties between rough wool and smooth as silk cashmere

That night in the temple, when he hurt her, the asps found her ravaged, her hair tangled; they buried their tails into her scalp as tree roots sew into earth and soil. They kept her safe from his sea, enthralled her, and pointed with their tongues to her escape. They guided her through meadow and forest to a quiet cave high atop a cliff.

freed from for a moment my sonic mechanics and I started to hear a free fiddling buzz it was that wild clicking din of innumerable tiny tigers -eye bug-leg violins: crickets! cruising from the roofs of blades play vesper serenades for June boys, vim Julies, whose bodies’ limbs are pinwheeling vibrato by their sides in halls of tall wheat grasses…

Light explodes from darkening skies. Not Sun, Yet, light unleashing elemental forces. The fragrance of recently mown grass As would be remembered by a thoroughbred Not so long ago a colt Building muscle and endurance Running like the wind through the grass just because You were meant to run like the wind when you are a colt.

About three months ago, if you had had the opportunity to visit Lucy, you would surely have seen me, wrapped in a white plastic bag, sitting on the floor and leaning against the side of a shoe rack against the wall right beside the door to the outside. Certainly, you would have been able to tell, by experience or by instinct, that I was not supposed to be deserted there, indeterminately, in that unsightly condition.

They were both shocked when the letter arrived, the stationery matt and generous, unlike the crabbed hand it bore. The pages, when Róisín opened it, gave off the stale reek of cigarette smoke. ‘Who’s it from?’ Sheila asked rubbing her hair with a towel. ‘Only Guillame Le – fecking – Quennec,’ Róisín said with a grin. ‘Says he’d love to come and read at Peninsula next month from his new book.’

tired of waiting he writes
while there’s timeand the white space
to trace the light’s line
from place to place
from all the corners of his mindfind
the dust of all that’s gathered there

Janie was dead. For real this time. Connie rounded the familiar curve at Hooper Hill Road, pulled over to let an impatient driver pass, and used the moment to once again check her rear-view mirror. They said she’d get used to it but she hadn’t.

I’d like to say that the day I quit God
was like a knuckle-sandwich,
a lightening bolt, or a surprise
seizure that tore through my brain. I’d like
to say that the earth shook, shattered,
and birds screamed their shrill cries. I’d like
to say that hurricanes raised hell,
ice caps melted and died.

HANNA was cold. The fine red hair on her arms stood on end. Goosebumps. The unicorn on her shirt pranced on its tiny patch of grass with every gust of wind. Dark clouds had rolled in above her. Rain was coming, she could smell it. She wanted to be down from this metal arch. When she had finally climbed all the way to the top, each blue rung cold on her hands, except where the paint was chipped – still cold, just not blue, she realized an important part of the climb was unconsidered: getting back down.

My father buys plums and asks me not to ruin them this time.
When he leaves the room, I press my thumbs
into them until the skin gives out, until the whole kitchen is muscle and juice,
dark-purple in desperation.
I can’t remember the word for touch in Spanish, can barely remember it
in my own tongue.

“Well then, Andrew, ought we to start with the basics? Please, take a seat.” I had never met Bill from Fleet Safety before, but his presence disturbed me. The main office door to our left was closed, the thin light at the bottom barely visible. Bill had spread out his documents on the table before us and now sat with his hands folded, expectant. Steam rose out of the cup beside him. His suit was as black as the coffee he drank.

For three days I was a stranger in your city,
Pressing my palms to a train window
Watching for the blue glint of the bay.
I thought I might find you in the water’s thin skin,
In the creamy foam, speckled and bearded with wrack.

So that was it; her sister was dying. Riza received the call this morning from her niece in D.C. She was expected to go to Manila. Her daughter Melanie was already there, sleeping on a cot in the hospital room. Riza shut her eyes tight and rubbed her forehead with her fingers. She searched her mind for a reason to stay. What could she tell them?

I was not born in these kinds of waters
but I came to believe and to canoe away
on the river of silty glass
bugs skating the surface
sunlight pouring into me
laughter echoing off the empty
voices raised, poles poised, fish fleeing upstream even.

I stare at my cell phone in a sick state of disbelief. I had missed Justin’s one call. He left a message that I play again, hoping it’s not real. “Mom, how did I get here?” I hit stop unable to listen to it in its entirety. “I don’t know,” I whispered. I’m not sure I can do this anymore, being privy to his suffering and the hell he lives in. It’s too hard. But I am the one he needs; the one he reaches out to, his mother. I know that if I abandon him he won’t survive.

I am going to pay a man
to stand by my car
and protect it
from the nomadic thieves
of the grid deserts,
the car I dreamed about
when I was a child
when I was unemployed
when I was weeping
in small painted rooms
with my hands in a ring.

Miss Dinuzzio and I sat catty-corner in snug armchairs with three stacked nesting tables between us. She removed the glass bowl from the tabletop tattooed with faded cup rings. “Do you have any questions?” “Nope. I think I’m okay.” The job was straightforward. I would step in as Mother’s companion, so Miss Dinuzzio could teach her Saturday morning piano lessons in peace.

Kids, when I cut out of this life,
don’t turn on the tears and grieve;
kids, when I die I don’t want
any golden speeches saying kind things
about me or some windbag sniveling about
death’s sting, God’s grace and
the triumphant rise to heaven.

The room is dark; a large queen-sized bed sits in its center. The Old Man who occupies it is propped up on a pile of pillows, the skin on his cheeks sagging like so many yards of curtain valance; his eyelids lowered to half-mast; his mouth yapping up and down like a marionette puppet whose strings have been pulled by too many hands.