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The eyes looked into his own with a meaning, a malign significance.

Here was rot and immemorial night. And death. Death above all.

I am eleven years old and too young to die, but I am dying nonetheless.

I am eleven years old and too young to die, but I am dying nonetheless.

If, on your deathbed, you want to watch a movie, don’t let me pick.

He handed us sticks of dynamite, rolled in wax paper like taffy.

He always talked of making money with the air of a connoisseur.

“I mean it, Martín. I won’t marry a man with a bald lip, like a boy.”

Ron Carlson

This storm scares me. A foreign climate occupies the land.

I can’t hold a face held before dawn & not see behind the eyes bullets.

I forgot to detail that the jumper leapt from beside the hanging Monet.

It was a Saturday night in November when his diagnosis finally came.

I managed to talk sensible Alice into a little pink outfit and high heels.

Part of me wished I’d never tried heroin. The rest wanted to be high.

On her sixty-second birthday Marge Olson got a call, not a gift.

I saw it on her face that day, a look like her heart would drift into the sky.

“Nothing does you so much harm as being in disgrace for lying.”

I had to prepare. I had to be able to save us from what was coming.

Stop her there, on the bank of knowingness, just before spring.

She could not remember what Past and Present stood for.

He resumed his nightly practice of writing without being able to see.

He was last in Calcutta more than fifteen years ago, for his mother’s funeral. Han Ru feels something vaguely discomfiting, followed by a surge of recognition.

“Now, just what brought you down all this way?” they wanted to know.

Love cannot override what cells do in the nighttime of our bodies.

I hold on to the shape of a star the way my aunts hold on to Jesus’s gown.

His looks were Russian. He was surrounded by mystery.

How smooth their bones, like alabaster shaved from moonlight.

The past, you hear it, the small hours, sucked down the undertow.

Chase Twichell