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Tear-streaked mascara, mascara-stained cheeks: a cataract of woe.

I loved hopping freight trains. It was cheap, dirty, and dangerous.

I rented a house in the woods of East Hampton as a form of therapy.

They peer into their mirrors to see whatever is bearing down.

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo’s cry.

She’d planned to choose an adult film and lie back with him to watch.

I stood there, wishing the ground would open up and swallow me.

I would chase it to the shores of the lake where the killer waited.

Audio clips of Pultizer Prize winner Jennifer Egan on her work.

I put out my lips, and we kissed through the newly painted fence.

Eszter Marosszeky and David Matheson

My mother said a woman’s handbag is more private than her body.

To enter the dust of their bedroom, to stand invisible on the plush carpet.

Despite cell phones, they seem connected only by smoke.

Do the work. Every day. Take a step back and see if you love it.

Heat heat and the sky a flame of sapphire, even rocks blazing.

We boarded a ferry eager for foaming water rushing toward our feet.

Husk was sturdy. He just breathed like it. Not like me. My lungs rattle.

Early on, Castro learned and opposed the unfairness of things.

Fidel narrates the home video: See the women on the beach? Beauty.

Tonight these writers lower their eyes and silence their words.

His beginnings, his genesis as a writer, and the fateful connections between life and art.

David, I don’t know how to say this, but I didn’t think you’d make it.

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.

Tana Wozcjuk

“Then I can promise to kill either of you if I ever see you again.”

Atomic bomb. How could those two words be said together?