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something to get her teeth in forget the shakes cancer patients are supposed to choose forget tapioca pudding. vanilla ice she wants what is full of blood something to chew to get the red color out of something she can attack fiercely my mother who never was namby-pamby never held her tongue never didn't attack…

Sometimes she calls me Chance and sometimes she calls me Desire. I was coming out of the laundromat wearing my little Graceland hat. What most astounded me on this particular day was the day itself, my being alive against such confusion, my being erect, one could almost say, as opposed to crawling all around the…

The first black sheet lies on the pond. The nursegirl takes us to search for her brother. At first her glass eye frightens, but as we stare at birch and dogwood night exposes itself and we can't see her anyway. We find the brother in the weeds smoking Pall Malls. She takes a stick and…

It is hard to begin with a death, albeit a metaphorical death, of what you thought would be your future. You look out as the rain pelts the mansard roofs of your neighborhood and think you could tell she was calling him to come to the phone while she was reading a book in the…

At low tide he appears, regardless of the weather. He's collecting the broken bottlenecks from the past century. Blue, green, brown and clear, each has a little story—it won't take a minute to tell—about a favorite beach in the South Seas, a sea monster as large as a house, a mad captain, a woman with…

The woman sat down in the thrill of afternoon. Around her the gray sun where the czars of space erected their drastic towers. It was nothing, she thought, leaning her head back. This vertigo and its ghost: hunger. She felt her head dropping to her knees. Wrapped her arms around herself. Ate the stolen torte….

after Robert Hass All the new drinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old drinking. The idea, for example, that each boilermaker erases the voluminous clarity of any idea. That the clown- teared sucker groping the beer-splotched top of that jukebox is, by just his presence, a someone falling sick in his…

for Kate Breathless, emerging into light, we stare with neighboring gargoyles over the square, so cool and blue, of Notre-Dame. Paris, 1969, your birthday: eight-year-old hand in mine. The city unfolds, fairy-tale spires rise to autumn sky, Sacré-Coeur flowers, white peony floating in space. I want this day to be as perfect as your face,…

Only one Disorderly Person was reported (No one cared enough to report me). Likewise, only one Noise Complaint (Can the whole village be deaf?). And, in an entire year, there was only one case of Indecent Exposure (Is no one paying attention?). Talk about breaking records, in all of 1989 there was only one Disturbed…