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“No, no,” we say. “We’re fine! Really! We love things just the way they are!”

Today the game was to try to catch one of the cats in a pillowcase.

Limbo: Latin, limbus, meaning a hem between sclera and cornea.

Cerberuses ran in packs, terrorizing drunks who fell in the snow.

They rose before us under a halo of lights like figures in a shrine.

The door opened, and Dan stormed in, shouting, “Motherfuckers!”

Once, when young and proud, I tried to grasp the enormity of the past.

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

Albert came to her rescue. “The Great Gatsby’s our religion,” he said.

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

We fed our dreams inevitable sins, the kind you lie about till you grow mean.

A small circle of friends and family babysat so she could go to school.

She always came back with her lipstick smeared all over her mouth.

You need to teach these cows to meditate. To lose their bodies.

I am part dumb, and blind, and deaf, and untasting and unfeeling.

It was the truth of it all—hunger’s chill, the scream beneath the surface.

We’d never had a cross word, but I’d never corrected him.

If he could not evade a serious question by a joke, he bolted.

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

there is no place on this earth I can run from my own prejudice

I had forgotten how to breathe, and then I learned again, all at once.

Louise watched from the shadow. She was looking for somewhere to land.

I was opposed to the taking of human life. I was opposed to all war.

My job requires me to make things disappear like a Vegas magician.

Give him a bottle of red wine. You’ll be his best friend right away.

He never stopped reminding me that I was born in Harmony, Georgia.

Without a working title, a poem could muddle meaning, confuse purpose.

There were so many tired, frayed words thick in the air around her.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands.