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damn it we both die anyway at different times, with different pains

She closed her mind to all familiar shapes and strained back.

Eleanor opened the door to Nick’s bedroom and felt breathless with fury.

He saw the car bearing down and gave it the finger, a snarl on his face.

“We know what can happen,” Mike says. “We choose to do this.”

The orderlies see him in the mirror and mistake it for his twin.

Ralph’s children had believed Christine was just after his money.

She confessed to Judd that she saw other men. She liked a good time.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I’m always driving through the desert, on the interstate’s black river.

Their leader is a badly wounded boy in need of wounding others.

Each time he retells that morning my dad forgets I was there too.

she will unchew the dried bulbs of history, spit them at the foot of her post.

I never entered no-man’s-land by any light brighter than the palest moon.

Before we were ornament, we were names moving in a mouth.

When you turn fifty, you have to prove to yourself you’ve got something left.

He showered, shaved, put on a clean shirt, then lay down to die.

He was shirtless and showcasing a large tattoo of the Twin Towers.

We could hear the parade three blocks before it arrived at our corner.

The summer Victor died, his dad spoke to no one but the canaries he kept.

Before sunrise I counted nine meteors scratching the heavens.

Sundays, your wife at Mass, we locked ourselves in my room.

Third Place

The small, inadequate marks follow the outline, things left behind.

Mistaking water hemlock for parsley, I die hours later in the hospital.

I’m guilty—locating my gratitude against someone else’s suffering.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

Mild nights would have us out of doors—at their opening I am rapt.

I have a maple in the yard and from time to time all is distant.