Explore

I like that it’s not me you pine for, and like that I don’t pine for you.

Language seems accomplice to grieving, everything dissolves.

I answered, blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings.

When we watched jellyfish, Mary Kate wondered if they dreamed of land.

A letter is like a poem, showing the marks of an unwilling composer.

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

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

I hear my brother’s wife whisper, It’s her again. Let the machine get it.

The blackness of her hair seemed to pull the color from her body.

I became a symbol of freedom, a miracle who had escaped the Devil.

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

It was as the angel speaking of Isaac, a deception, a test to survive.

Smoke and stock and toasted chili flakes. The garlic at marshmallow tan.

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

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

What small song do you sing under your breath that is only for you?

Louise Farmer Smith

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

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

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

With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?

As our friendship declined into torture, the prairie grew hotter.

She wags her index finger so furiously that I’m certain it will snap off.

It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.

Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.

His mother’s face had been that pretty, though more resigned.

Heaven preserve me from the Epidemic of a Proud Ignorance!

I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the Other.

These days I watch the world go by and do not breathe life into it.

What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?