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The Only Time We Think of It Is When It’s No Longer There

No fountains to quench the thirst between rounds of tag.

The Paperboy

Just before four in the morning, the dog barks, the headlights appear.

The Poem Is the Story

Sometimes a story is like a beehive. Sometimes an idea is like a poem.

The Profundities and Other Poems

Stop her there, on the bank of knowingness, just before spring.

The Rage of the Squat King

What would make a sane person want to watch such blood sport?

The Reader in Quarantine

She could not remember what Past and Present stood for.

The Recording Angel

Years they sought her, whose crew left on the water a sad Welsh hymn.

The Saltcutter’s Wife

The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.

The Second-Worst Rug My Father’s Ever Seen

I hear myself giving advice in my father’s voice: Take the emotion out.

The Session

Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso.

The Seventh Seal

Love cannot override what cells do in the nighttime of our bodies.

The Shortstop

I understood that for us there would be no mourning the shortstop.

The Silence Here Owns Everything

When he kisses me, my heart flutters in my chest like swarming bees.

The Sin of Height

What humanity needed was that gravity-defying miracle, the bird.

The Small Hours

The past, you hear it, the small hours, sucked down the undertow.

The Store in Which I Am Turned to a Widow

Outside of Ikea’s window the nighttime wind tilts like a folk song.

The Story of an Hour

There would be no one to live for; she would live for herself.

The Stroke

He glowered even as a little child. Maybe because he has your bad eyes.

The Stylist

Her bra is black, her breasts full and white. There is too much flesh.

The Territory of Being Beautiful

Between me and the sky is a screen door and a whole mess of wind.

The Threat of Peace

At a red light he touches his cheek. The stubbly skin is sensitive, febrile.

The Trade-Off

Strange then, strange now, that language wants to be alone with me.

The Traveling Onion

It is right that tears fall for something small and forgotten. And I would never scold the onion for causing tears.

The Visiting Room

We spread. Kneel. We’ll come out missing parts. This we know.

The Weary Blues

One said she heard the jazz-band sob when the little dawn was grey.

The Woman in the Rose-Colored Dress

My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.

The Word

She began to see the word, or traces of it, wherever she went.

The Writer

He came into town with his big red pen and began revising us.

Theater of War

Ajax killed men and then animals thinking they were men.

Then, It Was So

I waited and waited, rethinking first sentences in my sleep.