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The coverage of the state funeral, black horse bearing an empty saddle.

The air has grown inside me. It’s become a sanctuary.

Rebecca Lehmann

One day, we will all turn into choir girls—all soft and hollow inside.

I try to believe that even when cords are cut or people die we connect.

I wore the rose pants for weeks without telling anyone.

My first true love was Underwood, my mother’s typewriter.

The world seemed newly made and filled with a frightening silence.

The portal light, on your face, now, a rose light on a sinking freighter.

A boy knew he wouldn’t see his mother’s face as he rose from the mat.

Life is a dream, he thought. Something she knew and I didn’t.

The sense all along has been that there’s some madness in her.

Tanya jokes that she comes to the East Coast now only for funerals.

I tried to cheer my brother up by reminding him all clowns die too.

Chase Twichell

“You mean to fall in love with your wife while I’m gone,” she said.

If Vann kisses her, a mist will rise in her brain. A promise of oblivion.

Dogs electrocuted, set on fire. What buys the right to drown a dog?

Her mother is a locked door with another door behind it.

I was only five when Dad told me I had died. “You drowned,” he said.

All my life I wondered what it is to vanish like a ring of smoke.

If only to hold on by opening lord give me this one eighth day

Rain falls steadily, rattling down drainpipes and gurgling into gutters.

The guy from the funeral home can’t get the gurney into the house.

Her city, but no cats. Specks of color, no cloth.

The Others came in the light of day and splayed Father open.

Design a way to kill those rats, and do it now, Fiori, do it now.

Re: murdering democracy, oiling the shore, shearing the rain forest.

The next time we made love, I looked for the fox looking down at me.

The war was about to begin, and the four boys were
in charge.