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God, I need to know what happened to those who tried to cross.

He smelled like the bars my mother took me to in the middle of the day.

One makes one’s peace with words in a poem and space in a dream.

Everything is mine on loan: the leaves I’ve combed out of my hands.

“Why don’t you say anything, people? These thugs are murdering me!”

The transformation of their maid from shadow to sexpot thrills Maizie.

She had boyfriends before she met him. Well, not really boyfriends.

The men here don’t know where to place me, call me exotic grail.

Her sly smile was a vicious remnant of her life before Real Life began.

Pale dust clung to their skin like the lime he had thrown on the dead.

Those trees—each an epoch with its origin and history, rising into night.

“Refuge,” Nina said, tilting her head back; it was a word she learned.

I am not prepared for postwar Freetown. Postwar Sierra Leone.

Burly Viking raiders are standing in the coffee line, sharing pickles.

Carte blanche is bodily as chalk on dark asphalt, so enliven these eyes.

Descent jumps and jostles, nausea drops me back to the floodplain.

She looks in the mirror above the sink, and her image makes eye contact.

He didn’t fall in line with our well-established porn-shop hierarchy.

Rise the Euphrates, my first novel, grew out of a feverish dream.

Any invented quotation, played with confidence, can deceive.

What does it take for a woman like you to decide to do something?

Brassy bullets fell against the floral comforter like little candies.

Well, back home has really changed, you won’t get that same bammy.

Tobias Wolff

Kids were just let out of school to spend the summer running in packs.

You have to be three times better than the white kids, at everything.

It’s silly, I know, half-expecting to see Apollo playing lyre to a muse.

The sex in these fantasies was always a product of love.

On the other side of Paris an exhibit depicts their home, which is nowhere.