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And then I said, That’s what it means to testify: to sit in the locked dark muttering when you should be dead to the world. The muse just shrugged and shaded his blue eyes. So naturally I followed him down to his father’s house by the river, a converted factory in the old industrial park:…

for Angie and Darrell Our family came west from the plains; theirs came north from the desert. We met as neighbors at the intersection of aircraft factories and the Pacific Ocean in Hawthorne, California. “Join us for Thanksgiving,” they said. My husband and I and our two kids crossed the street with a platter of…

and green plaid shorts goes strolling through Juneau Park at eight o’clock with only a hooded yellow windbreaker for protection, trawling the bushes after work while tugboats crawl the dark freshwater outlook. Mist coming in not even from a sea, rain later in the evening from Lake Michigan, a promise like wait till your father…

“. . . I once took him to the train station in Minden, seventy miles away from our home, and the trains only go through Nebraska at night, the middle of the night, cause they plan it that way, cause I suppose Nebraska’s a dark passage no one wants to make awake and so I…

From a sparse handful of seed comes summer— Corn and convolvulus. Scatter of color on the mountainside, near snow. Gone, we want to say, of some longing in the slim afternoon— Though poppies collapse to soft flesh at a touch, heather tolls its little bells . . . • A bee, trapped between windowpanes. Its…

When the iceberg pulled by a team of white horses comes sliding down the boulevard, the crowd, which had been so festive, whistling, hooting, throwing their hats in the air, grows silent. Almost silent are the ten Kikuyu warriors striding in slow     motion, one clenched fist shooting up in the air every ten paces…