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I seek these ghosts because they allow me to return home outside of time.

My grandfather has a space where the tip of his thumb should be.

He didn’t come to arrive, he came to go, and yet that didn’t matter.

Soon I will walk up those same back steps the police took by force.

Please look away from Mars dangling so angry in so much darkness.

Our dog had held down what we had by pressing his belly to the floors.

Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.

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

I felt awful about imposing on him, but I was desperate to see the Derby.

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

God doesn’t punish wrongdoing. Rewards multiply if tended to in secret.

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

You knelt down to kiss her, avoiding, of course, the wound at her brow.

The intention of the writer is irrelevant to the success of the story.

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

Love isn’t the same as happiness. Some poet probably said that.

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

Ring, ring, ring at 2 a.m. means meth’s got my brother in the slammer again.

He’s in the back of the cop car, hands in handcuffs, shaped like infinity.

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.

The streets were filled with couples and families on their way home.

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

we’ve walked the streets: candied apples on sticks, fish heads.

The surface of night is disrupted. Ripples cross the neighborhood.

O Fatima if only you would lean my way my heart would quiver.

Once she said, “Dying is nothing, but . . . the separation!”

She came from the most worthless of all classes—the rich.

Here we were, seventeen, trapped by the sheer number of bodies.