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It commands your presence, mocking your impatience with its steam.

It’s been months since the cat died and still we find her hair.

Who thought to name a four-thousand-pound bomb Satan?

Diane Kirsten Martin

Sometimes they revert to trickery, apple their venom with a smile.

We want no truck with death. Not now while we’re busy feasting on figs.

Your face is a grain of rice, one small nothing on the world’s horizon.

Paharganj reels with beggars. Old women, boys, breast-feeding girls.

Why had she asked him to come along, someone she did not even know?

As Ilya sauntered back toward us, I saw a boy with nothing to lose.

Not every fate was alike. Not everyone ended up paired off in love.

Mikey said the hole wouldn’t lead to China, but he was frequently wrong.

Vita brevis, source of all not enough. Light leaked from stopped time.

There’s a god sitting, the morning foaming in his mouth.

I was constantly being torn between belief and disbelief in his narrative.

“Silence can be difficult, and we’re silent the whole time,” she said.

Now, this new dark blot on the street. Maybe motor oil, or blood or worse.

She had instinct for seeing what she could make happen.

She pointed to the end of the driveway. “Is he yours?”

What we know of love between species we learn from the bones.

I didn’t know I would be any good. But I knew I wanted to be a poet.

The Wolf put on a great performance, crawling around on the stage.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know my father’s grief.

We are nothing; less than nothing, we are only what might have been.

A voice like my mother’s nail polish and my father’s lottery tickets.

I push the stroller across the courts to the scene of the thing I don’t get.

Lynette had stepped on something sharp. There was blood.

She’s young and lovely in a mad, disheveled way, and hard to resist.

They say it is the soul that rises, not the body. But the body does rise—

She was laughing. Something animal in me was sparked, and I chased her.