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It almost makes you cry, to know that you are no longer needed.

I hear myself giving advice in my father’s voice: Take the emotion out.

Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso.

This would not be a wooing meal. I was cooking my man into submission.

He was warm that way, always tender, and maybe that’s the worst part.

He was trying to seduce me with his history, which was mine as well.

For a month after 9/11 Bella wept through all her appointments.

I thought it was beauty alone that gave significance to life.

Take this man, Stepan. His deep mellow voice soars in my heart.

Young people have a gift for reviving freshness of language.

He will be unable to resist his manias for symmetry and completion.

At a red light he touches his cheek. The stubbly skin is sensitive, febrile.

I found myself alone on the train in possession only of Knoll’s journal.

Surely a million mothers and school teachers can’t be entirely wrong.

“I—I am Martin Eden,” Martin began. (“And I want my five dollars.")

Her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.

Some people see the man but not the light, the field but not the varnish.

West Oakland was characterized by unemployment, poverty, and blight.

Bees kill wasps by gathering around and tightening in the middle.

Fatwas condoned our arrest for the rouged contours of our lips.

Our ambition was a clawing, grasping thing. It got us out of bed.

She looks down the street for Scott’s truck. He’s late but so is she.

Before he started spraying he would hand her the mask to put on.

But too much rain can translate anything to unspeakable.

Flesh is temporary, memory a tilting barn dismantled nail by nail.

David Lee

Condemned to an easy life balanced on the suffering in another land.

A sociopathic streak on my father’s side I try to put to good use.

I have so many T-cells I’m afraid of forgetting their names.

From a pyre on the burning ghat a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.