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Blacked-out little angel, you shuffle home under the streetlights.

The child writes, Child, and is amazed at this word on the page.

Another year another almanac, a washed-out castle in the sand.

He’s an excellent student. It’s just that . . . he thinks ideas are real.

The old-timer outside the guard station was knifing his own tires.

Under pillows of snow, the creek shushes the sharp architecture of ice.

I am a pornography of small promises, the chugging gin of the universe.

I roll lactic bubbles under my face with rose quartz, fuck a pillow in sleep.

Interviewer said he had no intention of stealing anything from Subject.

Unwall the summer in blue threading, gift of someone who loved me.

I wondered if the coyotes and deer were mourning the loss of Steve.

She looked over through the falling snow. “Jack?” she said. “Is that you?”

Her body is no longer the source of pleasure but constant pain.

The neighbors were Ukrainians with bad tempers and owned guns.

She sips the coffee and thinks about throwing herself off the balcony.

At nineteen I lived for three months as an earnest cocaine addict.

I could throw one of these rocks at the moon and watch it fall.

home is his hands, our bowls, so many gay fridge magnets.

Don’t start conversations or attract attention. Don’t be suspicious.

The power to alter one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark.

Sam was like family. He was the angel of my writing life in every word.

Jayne Anne Phillips recalls her friend, the legendary Sam Lawrence.

I was the man in her life. I know I’m different now. Now I’m a bird.

I taste on my tongue a gunshot of synapses warm and light like butter

I never left my wife, and she never left me, but this isn’t exactly true.

I didn’t know that by falling for you, I was falling for your demons too.

There’s something about traveling by plane. People tell their secrets.

they released themselves so knowingly into the soft wet air

Takis brought down the demons that would pursue him the rest of his life.

There’s no studying for this. I think souls must exist in wanted things.