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Sarah let herself be guided by her desire, inescapable and true.

Sex is the closest we can come to touching where touch resides.

Eyes wide open, I offer myself to a new boy and watch him grow.

He’d reenlisted in ’64; he would not go home until the War was won.

Grief is a rude houseguest. She stays up late. She leaves messes.

This so far is a haunting, the bleeding heart we used to hear about.

Her hips, her pelvis, broke free of concerns. His eyes hovered.

I love you to distraction, she would say. I love you beyond love.

We have mysterious inclinations. No one can explain it to us.

He was living like a coyote, out on the margins. But then a letter came.

Her appearances are fleeting, a gust of air, a murmur in the night.

A six-word story written by eighth-grader Marlon Jiminez.

Out by the road was her son standing without a stitch of clothing.

She was the idiot who fell in love with some high-class gigolo.

Since the accident she lost her hold on the world and never got it back.

Grandma was forced to break her vow of silence only three times.

The band was amateur at best. It didn’t matter. People loved them.

I should look at what I’ve done. How loosely she let him come to me.

He hadn’t meant to hurt her. Drowning people will do anything for air.

My shadow feels my company, my stepping as he steps.

In the closet: a single hair draped from the one hanger left.

I’m no longer the buzzards glooming over the mango tree.

I dream of watching my grandfather stagger home through the snow.

In school, he was called gook, chink, and one boy called him ching-chong.

I bought two for my wedding, planted them in pots on the patio by the pond.

He probably had an order. Ludes, Dexis, Black Birds—who knew.

We’re all trying, in our own ways, to parse what we may have done wrong.

The owl was a white that could not be compromised by any other color.

Bill Evans’s quiet solo was walking out on unbelievably thin ice.

I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah.