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We press closer to look at a picture: a handcuffed boy leaning toward us.

Let him search, Tricia thought, who knew what he might discover.

He was alongside without preamble. Elephants are not stealthy by nature.

Histories we spin from lust, our tongues heavy and soaked.

My love swims you, your shoulders like hard sails under the green curls.

Professor Flacks could tell you everything about James Joyce.

What will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water?

Wicked fictions wrap a young tongue’s sweet-tipped fibs into fact.

A homecoming, she says, as if you hadn’t been back in decades.

One day, we will all turn into choir girls—all soft and hollow inside.

Our brains interpolate from surrounding images, fooling us.

God was surrounding the chair, leaves flourishing from a sickly tree.

The coverage of the state funeral, black horse bearing an empty saddle.

A simple line of raging wet nearby, how as a kid I pictured the Nile.

In the many pages of the book of love this is only one story.

If life is an open vein, what’s brave about a sleeve-heart, sweetheart?

Corn repeats itself into a haze of tassels and sheaving leaves.

My “lonelymaking.” Also known as my horrible secret, continent-wide.

We did not know at the moment of parting that it was a parting.

She only eats condiments, pickles, slices of sharp cheddar.

You were drowning in the bathtub. Mother was in her room.

In that world I was a fish too eager to enter the nets; here, I’m a river.

insomniacs gesturing in a cave of neon light the narrative of their lives

Not all his children love themselves. Look at little Adrienne.

After you have read all you possibly can there may be a few lines left.

Just because we have birds inside us, we don’t have to be cages.

I wore the rose pants for weeks without telling anyone.

He had looked on it a thousand times and it never failed to kill him.

My first true love was Underwood, my mother’s typewriter.

When the light failed she listed all the places he might find her.