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I want to say hold these harp strings steady atop the tallest summit.

What if my mother could have been happy if I hadn’t been born?

Crows rasp from branches, scatter debris across unfinished plots.

Always I obliged the urban tree, any speechless unblessed nature.

At the memorial service, I could barely hear the student read.

The author reflects on a soldier’s experience, in just six words.

Mostly he was in a hurry, so he’d just stick it in and away we’d go.

He guessed it was the worst thing he had ever seen or maybe ever would.

The towns died as quickly as a single house, a house like ours, lit gold within.

We will use my entire bed and all my dishes, make dirty each chair.

We’ve seen the news. We know the story. How even our bodies hurt us.

The hound, the leash, the fence, the hens. So many of them.

This is the day when the saints all go silently to church in France.

Why did it take Steven’s small coffin to get me to see my own son?

Devanand Simon was twenty-five when the bodies fell from the sky.

When you are sixteen and sixty-five pounds, you are all shadows.

He longed only for Claire’s strange seriousness, her silent focus.

I couldn’t love the tree in every soul shouldering its own tiny autumn.

Water the boxed dirt, and up she’ll push, rising in red-streaked blossoms.

He fell to the floor and begged the gods. The gods were silent.

Refuge, Your church is often a house. Your Word is a house.

Many times I’ve stood at the lip of this river and wanted to crawl in.

I let the baby mouse live because I cannot kill what has ears.

“Even though we aren’t carrying out the deed, we are the most responsible.”

The first time I met you I fought your father in the driveway.

Why not keep singing when another car pulls up to the light?

she was sixteen, and swimming. she was seventy-one, and soft.

Their mother was the real beauty of the family, or so everyone said.

When Roy got to school he told his friend Jimmy Boyle about the dead body.

The girl marched directly up to me, glaring, and said, “You hit my dog.”