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Remind the children never to use the state as a metric for ethics.

Robin Troy

The wine was administered to Theo’s lips, and then the rest of us.

There was something that eluded me, that was always outside the frame.

An expansion into light, or we could have been, or were for a moment.

Don’t worry baby, that’s just the way things be sometimes.

Some portion of love is braided from lying, from the names of distance.

Break me like bread. Take me apart. Strip each rib down to light.

Abe shot himself, first year out of high school. Assholes said he was queer.

“Leaving for war, Hayes wept. He didn’t just cry; he wept...”

His eyes, dark brown and unwavering as he delivered the details.

Eleanor opened the door to Nick’s bedroom and felt breathless with fury.

I’m the astronomer unable to lower his telescope, or look away.

I offer you these outs, and it stings when you take me up on them.

Each evening spent guessing which hemisphere the moon might wreck.

I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their sameness.

He sobbed; he said he would go to therapy, stop drinking.

“We know what can happen,” Mike says. “We choose to do this.”

They felt smarter and sexier, especially when together.

A suitcase of the body slapped with stickers of scars from every location.

The orderlies see him in the mirror and mistake it for his twin.

“I love you” is always a quotation. You did not say it first.

Over the air conditioner, she hears, unmistakable, the bleating of a siren.

let me fall through some small bore into your tiny breathing eden

Don’t send me home without a round of applause if not a title.

A woman from the next table eyed him and he eyed her right back.

Lovers, a new set of six-word stories from Elizabeth Benedict.

You’d imagined yourself in the doorway, giving her a knowing look.

Something has to be what this is, old and primitive, and it sounds like this.

She was bad. A cool bad. All third-graders wanted bad like hers.