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I had been awake since balmy Tokyo on a train from lights of pornographic neon to places in silent mountains I will never see again. Across from me in the sleeper an old man undressed the veins in his legs looked like green lightning in hairless, gold skin. He wrapped himself in a robe moved…

1. The one she loves she hates. And too late, she says, for the thing love’s become to let her loose from its grip. They take it to the hills. Green tent in blue mountains. They’d bought themselves fishing licenses, and the conversation began on trout—cutthroat and Dolly V’s—names bruised and asthmatically deep inside the…

This was the first Thanksgiving with my wife’s family, sitting at the stained pine table in the dining room. The wood stove coughed during her mother’s prayer: Amen and the gravy boat bobbing over fresh linen. Her father stared into the mashed potatoes and saw a white battleship floating in the gravy. Still staring at…

In the ambulance a child is turning blue around the edges. The sweep of time has lifted up her life and we are a blur of hands trying to refasten her to it. Two fingers press a rhythm on her birdcage chest. The muscle clenched inside has a hole too wide. Time sweeps by like…

8.  Two Girls That day I reached and swept the flies from the face of a Vietnamese girl on the bed of a pickup truck, until I realized she was dead and stopped, is the day I will never forget. Of all days, that is the day. They crowded her eyes, until her eyes were…

Now that the fields belong to the crows and the dark rolls in on a cart with supper, we thicken the skin of the house, tuck a caterpillar of hay, a reverse moat, around the foundation. Half the crickets in Conway died last night under cold rocks—or do they all go at once, once chain…