One night, my father will come home late with a rifle in his hands / yelling “I’m here.” Everyone will laugh. / Every corner of the ocean is the same.

Here it was laid out: we’d tricked with Clint a few times over the years. Sure, he was a geek, but he possessed this obscure magnetism. He was so indelibly himself, we allowed ourselves, when with him, to believe that the established rules of conduct, constraining all men of our tribe, could be ignored.

The story the fiction writer reads is fiction. His wife has never cheated. He has never run over a dog.

I have a worm / beneath my hair — / a future worm, / a nerve / from the eternal / present.

You know where this is going: Danny lives across the street, house number 32-25 to my 32-26, and he is eight years to my seven;

The man was his father. How could he be so disgusted by him? His mother, long dead, always told him: your father will outlive us all, but not before he makes us suffer as much as he wants to, and more.

The snow was a wildcat that night, unpredictable and bright. You sat in the passenger seat, one hand screwed to the handle for safety. You should have been driving, but you called yourself a feminist.

Touch them, the tesserae, the shards of floating glass, which skim the rain-full gutter. Not dead: us/them—mere stutters, gluttons for new skin. Life, peel back your veil. Now, see? See it again: To be dead another time is a deciduous explosion.

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