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You move rocks, run water, check the path of mouse and rabbit.

A man and a woman joined by newspaper pages culture to politics.

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

I confessed to loving another man, streetlamp sequin on a rain puddle. Later, in sleep, your arms opened to me. Mid-snore compromise.

The everlasting shines through in the threshold between worlds.

My soul’s parts know little and don’t care whether I live or die.

“There’s life after birth! That’s what jails and lethal injections are for!”

There are certain defects which well mounted glitter like virtue itself.

I looked up how much everything would cost. Giving birth: $9,000.

When you turn fifty, you have to prove to yourself you’ve got something left.

You’re feminist? Neither one of you. You just like getting into fights.

Only one constant existed: I wrote. Writing was my center of gravity.

Mentors can suggest to you what more you are capable of.

“Your mother’s fine,” Giuseppe said. “We’re all completely fine.”

They’d developed Santa’s entire system, had written the code.

That Hawaiian shirt is the first thing Ratso’s owned that he hasn’t stolen.

Who mind loved would not rather be loved body too. Since all is all.

Third Place

All that existed was Louisa’s beauty—or Khin’s refashioning of it.

Dad doesn’t believe I’m beauty queen material. I believe in myself.

I am going to relate to you the most lamentable love affair of my life.

With your hands in the air you held an infant tightly, trying to save it.

Mistaking water hemlock for parsley, I die hours later in the hospital.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

I read that poem twice, didn’t I? I must have wanted to hear it again.

Salve, salve, Regina. As the song ends, he folds into the fabric seat.

It was hard to know what memories or images had marked him.

Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.

Cheer and cheer and cheer she sings a song on nesting wings.

Most people come to Africa because they are drawn to its misery.