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Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.

Sherman Alexie

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.

These days I watch the world go by and do not breathe life into it.

Grant had a lot of buttons on that coat—when he wore it.

In all the faded retellings of that night, there’s a lot he left out.

Then came “the sea of trouble” as he crumpled his bank statement.

Cruelty is cruelty and you don’t ask why, you just hit first and hit hard.

What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?

Someday you’ll understand, darling. Everyone will just—vanish!

On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain dissolves like a Eucharist wafer.

I sensed that a name defined who I was and would be in the future.

It suddenly seemed to her that the world was filled with little miracles. There were moments when love overcame her despair.

The phone rang at an awkward hour, too late at night to be good news.

A grin of bitterness swept thereby like an ominous bird a-wing.

Ten years ago, when I was in college, my father divorced my mother and said he wanted me to become responsible for her. That is why I fled to Italy.

I want these things to have another life, like the old garden behind our house.

Dad was blind until six months ago, when he bumped his head in the fire.

Insomnia! There is a sickly romance to the affliction—initially.

She had not anticipated that the nightstands would be an issue.

Here’s the world, sweetheart. One word as small & large as a father.

I’d make a tub of mud to keep live crabs. I’d refill it daily.

Music that tells of how things stand in the troubled world you now have.

That summer we moved to the house you would die in years later.

It’s been months, and the fields are good for nothing but night talks.

Teams spend days surveying the damage and label me a mess.

I want everything to mean. To have worth and weight. But it doesn’t.

“Why do we always fight,” he finally said, his voice quiet, resigned.

Here is the fat guy whose Chihuahua gnawed through his stomach.