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Any white man without a servant was presumed to be in need of help.

How do we bury
the dead stacking up against our picture window?

It was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with a lover.

You are the only one who knows not to pour water on the flame.

He had come to weavers’ Harris to make some testament.

You walk into your gramma’s kitchen only once for the last time.

May the dice throw their combinations at night. May it be June then July.

A camper fighting off a grizzly until someone can shoot it dead.

It’s not the sun and all its colonies that miss you—it’s the frailest barriers.

He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.

It’s a small deposit, but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation.

I could untie Minnie’s silk, restitch it into places I’ve lived.

She sits in her wax like a candle. A woman comes, a woman goes.

I want my former costar Glenn Close to call me “charm personified.”

Take my hand, lead me by heart over the blind stepping-stones to the edge.

Marie was Indian, and everything Indian required patience.

I shouldn’t have to say why the confederate flag is a symbol of hate.

Children can be seen as worldly things, not as souls with broken mirrors.

They’re not, and it’s not, and we’re not, and only a god can save us.

If you are water my left hand is a horse thief my right hand is alder smoke.

"In County": A new six-word story by Robert Olen Butler.

Make haste, my love, I am redrawing the scale of escape.

To get the job, always stay starched, creased to death.

you a ghetto dreamcatcher under my fitted warding ghosts

“Can’t you see Hemingway’s having breakfast with his grandson?”

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

We were alone in the world, and we had left dear ties behind us.

Phaethon thought he could drive the sun but was struck down to earth.

I realized you were my fourth love, and the system was always doomed.

A boat-tailed grackle counts the passing cars from the traffic light.