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He was alongside without preamble. Elephants are not stealthy by nature.

“The doors are closed,” she said, and we would not be flying to Paris.

Neither fame nor wealth could provide consolation for life’s brevity.

She wears her nakedness like it has been woven from air.

A car curved left, leapt the curb, and came at us like the line of a bullet.

Dan Gerber reads poems of boyhood, and from the end of his mother’s life.

I want to sleep in a bed next to a man who won’t dream of me all night.

We did not know at the moment of parting that it was a parting.

A homecoming, she says, as if you hadn’t been back in decades.

The angel lay in his body effervescent as a flake of alabaster.

No fields of gold. No ripe. One hill, no wave, no roll. I am billboards.

Not all his children love themselves. Look at little Adrienne.

In that world I was a fish too eager to enter the nets; here, I’m a river.

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

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

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

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

Some types of pain are just too deep to touch, are better left alone.