Do you remember the fig tree? All girls of a certain age read that chapter and cried. I look at you and can’t see what the world does. We’re…

  A crosshatched cloud drops like a split-fingered fastball. When I enter the cold the grackles find me, spitting the sound of their name in iron. On this forgotten holiday…

  Beet juice, that’s what your mother used to dye your hair that summer. I thought she would choose something different, something special, the fur of a red panda, her…

  For the two minutes and thirty seconds that my father is dead on the carpet of an office building in Downtown Manhattan I am laying on a dorm mattress…

  And what about the upbeat notes you promised yourself you’d write your one remaining aunt, alone in her house on the lake, milking another winter of its last drop…

  He’s been scoping me out for days. Through a reflection on my phone I watch him when he’s not watching me juking bodies, disappearing into crowds. He only leaves…

  She tried hard to greet the day with proverbial open arms but a locksmith had recently installed a double bolt & she had to press her shoulder against the…

  I was disconcerted when she asked me to throw her against the wall of her studio apartment since we just met in the hall of her complex. Do it.…

  for Laura a house floated by There were people in trees a tree dove into a kitchen ceiling the kitchen became a grill in the driveway the driveway was…

  The stray cat had her kittens at the end of the week in the old doghouse left behind the front shrubs. My son asked to hold and pet them,…

  By the workbench in the basement the old man pats his pockets to find the coin purse, royal blue, still rubbery, whose mouth splits in two lines of flaking…

  They never let me hear the pulse of your heartbeat, the music filling up my whole torso, building a world of rhythm and stars and cells and heat. It…