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I loved to walk down to the café where she worked and stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noir halfway down the page. She’d come to my table with her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressed all in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell, strong and female, would enter me like…

In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center, my fingers trace the outline of money folded into pocket and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend but will spend on a calm voice to tell me how I am to be…

In the stories it’s different: grief, like the dark, lifts eventually— a tenderness inside which, with all the clarity of bells when for once they ring like nothing but the ringing bells they are, it can seem that at last you’ve gotten away with something, like a horse you’ve stolen that, now, lighter than ash…

Amped-up grid lights growl stars onto the hay-baled dirt ring onto blistered chrome and rust-lace, car-shells taped and painted over to resemble shapes of cars. We’re bleachered, gum-shoed, bleached by glare, laughing at ourselves for being here, spilling beer and sponging powdered sugar from our rumpled shirt-fronts, smiling. Rumbles in the air, our guts, the…

Between mud walls and the kiva wind off the mesa broke his phrases, as we walked with Billy of the Parrot Clan and with others. The windows melting into blowing snow and the ripped- off split-level doors jammed on the adobes. Out of fleeting blue, then white, we caught bites about the time of killing…

Of the many things that he used to say to me, there are two I’m certain of: You taste like a last less-than-long summer afternoon by the shore just before September; and   You’re the kind of betrayal, understand, I’ve been waiting for, all my life. When did remembering stop meaning to be lit from…

I’m resting on a bench in the cemetery while Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy trace over the slopes of grass, but we can’t stay long, since it’s a day I need to go into the city, and when I stand up suddenly my left leg’s half a foot lower than my right, because I’ve stepped…

The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts. No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the name gift that came here, while Portuguese historians translate jumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If…

This endless room is deep blue, dark red. I’m wearing my Valentino gown, vintage silhouette but hand-stitched for me. It’s the same purple as my favorite twilight, just as I requested. Everyone is here—I can see across the way the black-rooted starlets and reality queens drinking acai Cosmos. And I can see the disgraced congressman…