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for Shin, born in Camp 14, North Korea   The smallness of men’s souls sickened you, especially your own. Yesterday, and all the yesterdays before that yesterday, executions at dawn. White hoods hid the heads. Ropes lashed the arms, piss wet the pants. You wondered how quickly the first one died while the other clung…

Because the foot fractures, because the body turns soft. Because      the mind says six miles nine miles twelve miles, and I haven’t run in weeks. Because another relationship is ended, I take two Advil,      and go to the movies. A retrospective; the sixtieth-anniversary print of This Is Cinerama, Lowell Thomas’ love note to technology      and…

Paula Modersohn-Becker to Rainer Maria Rilke 2 November 1908 Rainer, dear friend, you are mistaken. I am not a ghost. I am not a forlorn shade that follows you. It is your imagination, your guilt, your regret that conjures me. I have become the purest part of myself. Once, we spent so many nights together—…

The peacocks are dusty—           thirsty. They’ve come to the suburbs now looking for water. * Sisyphus walks in every town. Don’t tell me you thought there was only one—           stuck in a myth. Just look, he’s everywhere. * A doctor tells me he feels like…

I was home alone just hanging out on the sofa. It was in the position it used to be, against the side wall. Every now and then a phone seemed to ring, I couldn’t tell if it was his or mine. Two birds had got in. A big one and a small one. I had…

Arrives with his daughter, she’s all braced teeth and blunderbuss freckles, she bolts from the passenger seat of his Fiat Doblò and gallops with two dogs into the garden. It’s Sunday. Now suddenly here in his hand the awkward contraption: steel forks either end of a steel collar, galvanized spring and trigger, toothed prongs that…

Once a doctor inserted an instrument like a tube into my nose and throat. He said it wouldn’t hurt. He said it would drain the signs. He might have said sinuses. I was still young, young enough to play with paper dolls. I remember because I pulled a papergirl out of my pocket and introduced…

A large blousy bird in the nest—the vee       of her beak wide open to receive            all that I stop by to drop in.           Torn twigs are rough pricking      while the nest floor is mossy and tender. I let tasty bits fall into her mouth one after the other after the other—       she…

You could be rowing across a parking lot full of strangers who don’t see you, or drifting silently through the thick walls of an institution, when you reach that shore. And whatever you have on, even a plain hospital gown, that will be your robe for the ceremony that takes place in your last breath,…