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Don’t worry baby, that’s just the way things be sometimes.

Since the day the bell was cast I have sat in the bishop’s carved chair and waited my turn.

Some portion of love is braided from lying, from the names of distance.

Break me like bread. Take me apart. Strip each rib down to light.

Abe shot himself, first year out of high school. Assholes said he was queer.

Eleanor opened the door to Nick’s bedroom and felt breathless with fury.

I’m the astronomer unable to lower his telescope, or look away.

I began to look for evidence of my father’s duplicity in his body.

I offer you these outs, and it stings when you take me up on them.

Each evening spent guessing which hemisphere the moon might wreck.

Our griefs perceive what we dismiss: the slight give of stage boards.

“We know what can happen,” Mike says. “We choose to do this.”

I did lose my dirty fingernails and ragged legs, my purpled forearms.

They felt smarter and sexier, especially when together.

He’s walking loopy, so I know he’s been had something besides beer.

Liz wore a brass wedding ring, and had no marriage certificate to show.

Ralph’s children had believed Christine was just after his money.

A woman from the next table eyed him and he eyed her right back.

Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.

The moon rescinds its blessing, rests its forehead on a crosier of ivory.

She was bad. A cool bad. All third-graders wanted bad like hers.

We drove, talking fast, fast, fast. He was always going for my zipper.

I arrived that evening barefoot and swathed in a sort of striped toga.

Lynn Freed reads from her collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man.

I’m always driving through the desert, on the interstate’s black river.

Idzia is a little monster. For a monster, though, she’s awfully cute.

Maybe that’s what she feels, not stranded, but suspended in time.

I had pasted a pink Post-it to my phone screen that said DON’T DRINK.

I never entered no-man’s-land by any light brighter than the palest moon.

To keep the baby safe, we sealed the house as if against bad weather.